Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle
by lentils on lent
Summary: As a fan, I found AC to be a sub-par sequel unworthy of the original FF7. So I'm writing this fic, which tells a different story of what happened 2 years after the game. Work in progress. Old chapters subject to revision. Criticism always appreciated
1. Prelude

Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle

Prelude

.

Somewhere today is a beautiful day. Above the clouds, geese stretch their wings and fall back on the breeze, letting the wind take them where it will… even if the skies ahead are starting to look murky.

Beneath the clouds, life takes on a different color. Heat and toil fall to those who walk the land – here is an endless stretch of clay, lifeless aside from the occasional scattering of some random lizard or insect. Those without tough skin and cold blood should find these conditions more than a little oppressive – so much is true for at least one red-coated mammal right now.

Followed by the matching red trail of its company, the creature pants and tramples along the bottom of a fissured, dried-out ravine. Its weary legs push forward, driven by the narrowing channel and a resolve likewise focused ahead.

Coming to a cul-de-sac in the ravine, the creature and its train spring up the impeding cliff until they stand firmly on top, overlooking a massive city in disrepair.

The geese pass over them.

For those familiar with this world, the scene described here conjures up images Nanaki and his offspring, reaching the end of their pilgrimage to the forested ruins of Midgar five-hundred years after Meteor.

The resemblance is deceptive; at this time it has been only two years since the cataclysm. Nanaki (also known as Red XIII) is still childless, his current party currently limited to only one red-coated companion. The city hasn't been swallowed up in vegetation either: though still hurting from Meteor's wounds, Midgar remains populated, functional, and fully committed to rebuilding itself.

And reinventing itself.

Initially, the city had been put up with the sole purpose of draining the land beneath it. The Lifestream, whose subterranean flow regulates the cycle of life and death, had been moving too slowly for the tastes of some. Hence Midgar: a way to make the cycle go faster, a way for a privileged few to purchase generations' worth of vitality at no cost to themselves.

So it went. The great minds behind this enterprise went on to amass enough natural wealth to sustain all life on the Planet a dozen times over – but that was not enough. With all material pleasures provided for, their appetites took on a metaphysical aspect, craving acquisition as an ends to itself. They piled gains upon gains over the bottomless pit in their hearts, happy let the future rot for a whim.

These men were the Shinra Electric Power Company.

Named for founder and CEO President Rufus Shinra Senior, the Shinra Company made its fortune trafficking the Planet's lifeblood, patented and sold as "Mako energy." But that was just the start of it; the so-called electric power company grew its monopoly to encompass power in all aspects. Piece by piece, city and state disappeared into the corporate machinery, with Midgar and Junon leading the way. By its tenth anniversary, Shinra corporation had grown from a vendor of basic utilities to an absolute world order. Those who dared resist – the proud people of Wutai, for instance – faced swift reprisals from Shinra's superhuman army, SOLDIER.

In times like these, it seemed that the empire's reign would never come to an end.

But an end did come. It came with the coming of the end of the world, a lethal moon-sized ball of cosmic space coagulate cultured from black magic.

Jenova's Chariot.

Curd of the Milky Way.

Meteor.

As it drew closer, the Planet veered into chaos: titans sleeping beneath the earth were roused to rampage; President Rufus Shinra Junior and what remained of his loyal subordinates were killed; all eight of Midgar's reactors were destroyed in the pre-impact hurricanes… yet for these disasters, it was the ceasing of this destruction that dealt the greatest injury to the Shinra company. When the Lifestream erupted from the ground to repel Meteor, a long forgotten truth surfaced with it, a truth that took years of propaganda for Shinra to suppress.

And when the people of Midgar saw those green rivulets move on their own and wash away Armageddon, in that moment they saw their fuel source for what it really was.

It was alive.

It had saved their lives.

It was life itself!

And they had been burning it away for reasons like microwaving a bean burrito.

After suffering so much damage to its reputation and commercial asserts, the Shinra Company found itself reduced to a pale shadow of its former self in the democracy that rose from the ashes of Midgar: no army, no empire, just a has-been electric company named after a now extinct bloodline. The corporation suffered its final act of emasculation at the hands of the new Midgar city council, which issued a series of environmental regulations making it all but impossible to legally produce Mako.

What happened next wasn't hard to predict: dozens of alternative energy companies sprang up overnight, each hoping to claim Shinra's former monopoly. After witnessing several months of counterproductive rivalry, the city council decided to step in and choose a victor worthy of government subsidy, an "official solution" to Midgar's energy crisis – for the time being, at least.

Stationed on that cliff looking over Midgar, Red XIII and his crimson companion stand before an awesome and terrible sight. Land, air, and sea all bear the mark of the victor: in drilling rigs, tankers, refineries, and smog, the Ibsen Oil Company has written its supremacy across the landscape.

In little over a year, Ibsen has grown powerful enough to buy up much of Shinra's former military. Using their new purchase, the oil company has deployed forces in the Gulf of the Northern Continent (colloquially known as Bone Village), home to the Planet's largest deposits of fossil fuels. Of course, Ibsen's spokespeople are quick to assure the public that these actions are justified: "We are merely protecting our industry from acts of terrorism by extremist groups," they say, citing a recent bombing of a refinery in the area. To many, all of this sounds terribly familiar.

And so the geese continue toward the horizon in their yearly migration. Mako or oil, smog or no smog, the cycle continues to repeat itself.


	2. Darn Fine Pie

Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle

Part One: The State

* * *

.

In the Sector Four district of Midgar, tucked behind the porn theater and the wig shop, there is a small pub called the Seventh Heaven. Having had its original location buried along with thousands of lives in the rubble of Old Sector Seven, context has since moved the pub's name from a cute play on words to a subtle reference in protest of the greatest atrocity in Midgar's history.

Like its predecessor, the second _Seventh_ is co-owned and operated by Tifa Lockhart, a strong and caring woman who lives upstairs with co-owner and former comrade Barret Wallace, as well as his six-year-old daughter Marlene. A guy named Cloud Strife is supposed to be living there too, although these days it seems like the only time he's "home" is when he comes by to pick up the mail.

Not tonight though. Tonight Cloud has come to the Seventh Heaven to meet with an old friend and discuss some serious propositions over dinner. Incidentally, this discussion won't actually take place until dessert – who knows, maybe it was planned that way; Tifa's cherry pie always did make everything more agreeable.

In any case, the pie came, coffee was served, and the offer was laid out.

A long and awkward, sweet and flaky silence followed.

"Well?"

"Not interested," Cloud replied offhand, pulverizing a fistful of sugar cubes in his coffee.

Reeve added a pinch of non-dairy creamer to his own cup and pressed on patiently. "Please, I'm asking you as a friend… "

A young woman standing nearby chimed in with a seasoned and cynical laugh.

"That one never works on him," she quipped, pouring more coffee for Reeve.

Cloud's expression curdled. "Tifa, do you mind?"

She excused herself indignantly and went behind the bar to wash some dishes. Toweling off a large brandy snifter, she remembered herself in Reeve's position two years ago, plying Cloud with talk of promises and personal obligations, hoping that the hero might answer his calling.

She knows better than that now.

Reeve shook his head despairingly. "I don't know how you can just sit there and act like nothing's wrong while Shinra's still out there, devising a way to rebuild its empire as we speak!"

Cloud shrugged in his usual manner. As far as he was concerned, these conspiracy theories were beyond ridiculous. Yes, Shinra still existed – as an innocuous, marginalized electric company being run on its last legs by an incompetent President Palmer.

"They're harmless now. Washed up."

Reeve lowered his cup to reveal a wry mouth. "So they'd have us believe."

Mr. Tuesti has good reason to be more suspicious than Cloud. Unlike the ex-Soldier, Reeve has spent nine years of his adult life working for the Shinra Company, coming to know its unique brand of bullshit like a sixth sense. He can smell it coming from the media, from city hall and Ibsen Oil and so on, ad nauseam. As to what it all means, he can only guess. The specter of the fallen empire that looms over Midgar is like a shadow peeking out from the corner of some dark alley: there's no telling whether a tiger or a tabby waits around the bend. Shinra could very well be in its death throes, as they seem to be on the surface. They could also be exercising greater power than ever from behind the scenes. Nothing is certain.

"Let's say they really were back in business," Cloud postulated. "What could they do? Mako's illegal now, remember?"

"I take it you don't keep up on current events," Reeve rejoined, stroking his beard judiciously. "The allegedly harmless Shinra Inc. you speak of has recently announced its plans to step back into the game with a new form of Mako energy… one that falls in compliance with the city's environmental regulations."

"Whatever." Cloud shrugged and shook his head like he always did, as if the movement had been hardwired into his brain. "It won't work. Ibsen rules the market now."

"And is that really any better? If Mako reactors don't kill the Planet, then I suppose we'll let global warming do it," Reeve bellowed as if from a podium.

It's a habit he sometimes falls into, what with all the public speaking he does these days. In the past two years Reeve has founded and lead the World Restoration Organization, an activist group promoting sustainable alternatives to Mako and fossil fuels. As long as he draws breath, Reeve will speak out. He stood by silent at the commercial rape of the Planet once before, and he would sooner die than make that same mistake twice.

The story goes something like this:

Once upon a time, a promising young architect had been hired by a certain up-and-coming energy company to design the world's first Mako-powered city. Full of naïve optimism as young people often are, the architect saw this job as the chance to build his utopia, a society where technology could overcome conflict, suffering, and scarcity. And so, surely enough, the young man with big dreams and little experience learned to compromise his ideals bit by bit as his employer made him complicit to one atrocity after another, justifying the means with the ends until, one day, his utopia had become an eight-headed steel and concrete monster that ate the very people it was supposed to feed. By then the young man was no longer so young, and his spirit had been worn to a nub. He'd resigned himself to a life of banal evil, which he carried out day to day with the alacrity of a reanimated a corpse cursed to walk the earth.

Two years ago, Reeve's life was changed forever when he took on a very different job for Shinra. The assignment was simple as it was bizarre: use a surveillance robot disguised as a theme-park mascot to befriend and monitor a group of eco-terrorists plotting against the company.

The group was a small band of five or so rebels calling themselves Avalanche. Their leader was a young man.

Young and naïve, like someone Reeve had once known.

"Suppose this global warming theory of yours is the real deal," Cloud granted. "What do you want me to do about it? Aren't you trying to avoid paling around with us 'former terrorists?'"

"Yes, I am… very sorry about that." Reeve washed down a sigh of regret with the rest of his coffee. "But you must understand. As long as I'm head of the World Restoration Organization, I have no choice but to keep my distance from you and the rest of Avalanche if we are to have a chance in this political climate."

This is true. As unpopular as Shinra is these days, you can bet the media credited them with saving the world two years ago when the only other candidate was an anarchistic group like Avalanche. At the end of the day, all established systems, no matter how virulently opposed, all find a common enemy in revolution. History has therefore been conveniently arranged along the following lines: Rufus his father are the scapegoats responsible for their company's crimes; Scarlett and Heidegger were the martyrs who defeated Sephiroth and saved the world with their Sister Ray cannon (which still stands today as a monument to their victory); Avalanche was the bane of everyone's existence, the terrorists who, for the sake of their own political gain and extreme ideologies, sabotaged almost every military action taken against Sephiroth, the Weapons, and Meteor. If the nascent government of post-crisis Midgar had the luxury of time to pursue indictment, every surviving member of Avalanche would probably be rotting in a prison cell by now.

Hence Cloud's understandably irritated response: "Why do you want my help then?"

Acknowledging the question and its underlying sentiments as perfectly reasonable, Reeve did his best to provide a perfectly reasonable explanation.

"Well," he began, "to be frank, a so-called 'former terrorist' is the perfect candidate for conducting any activity that might undermine our credibility at the organization if we were to attempt it ourselves."

"And what kind of activity is that?"

"As you know, I suspect a great deal of corruption in the New Coalition Government. No doubt the stigma of Shinra is still there, but to what extent I'm not sure. That's why I need someone who can conduct a little espionage… just enough to shed some light on the situation and hold some these sleazier politicians accountable."

"You've got the wrong guy," Cloud protested, nodding in the direction of a hybrid bicycle padlocked out front. "I'm just a bike messenger."

"A bike messenger who's successfully infiltrated several maximum-security Shinra facilities in the past!"

"Barret's done the same thing, why don't you bother him?"

"Mr. Wallace and I… have our differences."

"Differences, huh? Like you kidnapping Marlene and him not wanting you to?"

**_Whap!_**

Something damp and smelly struck Cloud across the face. With squeamish deliberation, he wiped the dankness from his eyes and hesitantly opened them to discover Tifa, wielding a dishrag and no longer deigning to keep to the kitchen.

"Quit being such a jerk!" she snarled, threatening Cloud with another slap of her clammy terrycloth. "None of that matters now, okay?

Reeve waved his hand in polite refusal. "Please, you don't have to defend me. My past actions are what they were, and I will always have to answer for them."

"But–"

"So then–" he turned back to Cloud "– am I to assume that you have no interest in lending your skills to the WRO?"

A spiky head nodded yes.

"Hm… I see. I think I'd better get going then. Thank you for your time, Cloud, I hope you reconsider what you think is best for the Planet. In any case, we're holding a rally tomorrow evening in Wall Market… you're more than welcome to attend." He produced a small flyer and set it on the table. "That goes for you too, Tifa."

"I'll try to make it," she replied.

Reeve gave a humble nod of thanks as he gathered his coat and hat. "Take care… both of you." Then, placing a dented fedora on his head and tipping it toward Tifa: "Thank you for the meal, Ms. Lockhart. I must say you make a darn fine pie."

"Uh… you're welcome."

Having thus concluded their engagement, Reeve began to make his way toward the door when he was arrested by a sudden recollection. "Oh! And Tifa, one more thing!"

"What?"

"Make sure to watch Channel Four tonight at ten!"

"Why?"

"You'll see!"

The door swung shut and Reeve vanished into the depths of the Midgar night, gone before the splash of shaken glass and tinkling shop bells had faded into silence.

The clock ticked solo for a few measures.

"Well Cloud, you made a genuine ass of yourself. I hope you're satisfied."

"Hey, I'm not the one who wasted Reeve's time by setting this up in the first place."

Tifa stamped her squeaky-sneakered foot on the hardwood floor. "I set this up for you, damn it!"

"For me? Why?"

"I don't know, maybe I just thought it would be nice if you found something meaningful to do…" She plucked Reeve's flyer from the checkered tablecloth and set it in front of him. "While you're off working for minimum wage and wallowing in existential dread, there are plenty of worthwhile causes you could be getting involved in!"

"I can't."

"How come?"

"Because," Cloud began, before whatever desire to share his thoughts broke into exasperation. "Because I just can't, okay? If you're so bent on making a difference and all that, why don't you sign up to become Reeve's newest remote controlled toy?"

"Fair enough. I guess you'll have to be the one looking after Marlene while Barret's at work then. Why not? We all know how great you are with kids…"

Cloud couldn't argue with that.

His scowl went slack. "Marlene… I wish I could…"

"I know, I know… you think you're no good to us here. But what about the rest of the world? There's still plenty of people out there, Cloud – real, living people you can help!"

Her words struck fresh blood from a shabbily healed scar.

_"Living people…"_

**_Plink!_**

A pale green orb bounces off the granite floor.

**_Plink!_**

It sounds like a champagne flute being flogged in slow motion, the tortured ring of crystal that refuses to shatter. It reverberates through him with each bounce, measures every crack in his heart with the ruthless precision of a metronome.

**_Plink!_**

"Are you even listening to me?"

Cloud blinked.

"I can't help anyone," He concluded abruptly, rising from the table. "Goodnight Tifa. Thanks for dinner."

"So it's back to the fortress of solitude then?" She looked at him with the dry expression of a woman who has come to expect disappointment. "I don't suppose you ever plan on telling me where it is you're always running off to…"

Cloud pretended not to hear her. "Goodnight Tifa."

And then, without another word, he was gone.

With a heavy sigh, the weary young woman locked up shop for the night and headed upstairs. As she passed through the hallway, without thinking, but stop and stare at Cloud's bedroom. It was an odd little box… an unfathomable vacuum, much like the man himself. It couldn't exactly be called a bedroom, seeing as it had no bed. Some might say it was his office for the courier service he ran, but then he was never around to do even that properly (he paid Tifa to take his calls, keep track of customer orders, and sort out packages).

"Storage space," she muttered conclusively, casting a final glance through the cracked door.

At that moment something tugged at the strings of her waitress apron.

"Did… did Cloud come home?" a little voice peeped.

Tifa turned around and saw Marlene in her pajamas, looking up at her with expectant eyes.

"Hey doodlebug, shouldn't you be asleep?"

"I want to see Cloud," she demanded in the voice that six-year olds often use to demand things.

"I'm sorry honey, but he left."

Upon hearing this, Marlene's eyes seemed to fade. The flicker of hope had been snuffed out of them.

To see Cloud's neglect do this to a child distressed Tifa greatly, though for Marlene's sake she didn't show it – in that respect, Tifa Lockhart lived up to her surname.

They say a mother lioness can summon up to ten times its natural strength when protecting its cubs. The same must be true of people with respect to strength of the spirit, because say in and day out Tifa has her heart wrung dry, yet she can still always find it somewhere within herself to comfort Marlene with a smile.

"Come on, you little rugrat," she said with a cheer, hoisting Marlene her shoulder, "let's get you back into bed."

A moment later, Marlene found herself snugly tucked between cotton sheets populated by moogles and chocobos.

"Goodnight Tifa," she yawned contentedly.

"Goodnight Marlene."

And with that, the lights went out.


	3. The Histories and Anatomies of Midgar

Following his sudden exit from the Seventh Heaven, Cloud had been just as brisk in wrangling up his bicycle and setting off into the night. He'd come as far as half a kilometer when the street he traveled terminated in the mouth of some dark crumbling alley. Cloud dismounted ushered his bike it into the breach, winding through squalor and obscurity until the dank passage coughed them up at a perpendicular thoroughfare. Here was an endless deluge of cross traffic, leaving Cloud with little choice but to stand there for the braying of horns and spewing of fumes for the better part of ten minutes. During this time the intersection saw a car operated by one particularly negligent motorist, who, being more interested in his PHS mobile phone than the road, strayed from the yoke of traffic and struck the curb where Cloud stood, forcing the ex-Soldier to jump back lest he be mowed down.

Beyond the perfunctory recoil here and there, those who bore witness to this blatant act of reckless driving were only faintly alarmed, even at seeing an innocent young man nearly crushed in the process. Indeed, considering the big picture, such things are hardly remarkable in this town. If we were to zoom out a few meters from the incident as it occurred, we'd see nothing more and nothing less than a typical city block in Midgar: traffic rushes madly onward; people barrel past one another with hands in their pockets and gazes averted; rising sewer vapors glow ethereal in the light of electric neon hieroglyphs; and one corner turns onto another prospect lined with the same, which turns onto another, and another. The streets overlap with the consistency of warp and left, laying the pattern for a similar crisscross of concrete slabs and steel beams on the vertical axis. The city is a jungle of right angles. Grids upon grids.

Distancing ourselves further from this picture, our view of Midgar soon admits a massive superstructure sitting in the mush pot of the city's circumference. Girded by pumps and pipes germane to the bygone age of Mako energy, the bloated haunches and elongated neck of this building suggest the figure of a dragon. The resemblance is most likely intentional; this is, after all, the tower that once served as center of operations for the draconian Shinra Electric Power Company.

Today it provides a headquarters to the New Coalition Government of Midgar.

Extending from the base of the citadel is the Sister Ray cannon – a rather phallic structure, considering its name. Although no longer operational in a technical sense, the cannon still performs at least one important function: to remind the citizens of their need for a ruling class and military, no matter how corrupt. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what some might think about Shinra, you can't deny that they've succeeded in blowing a lot of bad stuff up (the sapphire Weapon, the diamond Weapon, and Sephiroth's protective barrier, to name a few). The cannon sweeps Midgar's radius like the gnomon of a sundial: as the day progresses, its shadow passes over sectors Four through Eight. For at least half of Midgar, then, there must always be that humbling moment of darkness, the moment in the day when the Sister's Ray's barrel eclipses the sun and recalls the shadow of Meteor. For the people caught in the cannon's roaming pall, it is a time of mourning and reflection, a time to be thankful for the aversion of doomsday and still shudder at the memory of it. And then, as if satisfied by this or that citizen's inward display of genuflection, the shadow moves on, searching for the next man yet to pay his daily homage to the machinery responsible for the safety of modern society. And while the cannon provides this service to half the city, the former Shinra tower casts another shadow over its eight sector children throughout the day, achieving more or less the same result.

At this point it should be noted that the sun and its position to these structures can now be observed anywhere in the city. High society no longer announces its position so literally as it used by confining the lower class beneath its streets. When Meteor had set over Midgar, the city's upper plate naturally took the brunt of it, being stripped almost bare in the pre-impact storm. As a result, when the time for reconstruction came around, the majority deemed it better to dismantle the remains of the upper plate altogether, devoting those efforts instead to repairing/gentrifying the slums.

Following an unprecedented phase of reformation and social upheaval, the proletariat walked away from the deal with a little sunlight.

Everyone now lives under the same sky. No longer do children petition the heavens for food only to be answered by a sewer system surging with the shit and piss of the rich. Without the rancid underbelly of the upper crust hanging overhead, slum-dwellers rest assured that the rotting pizza rots no more and every man is now entitled to his slice of the pie.

At least, that's what the politicians promise them in so many words.

.

The streets, the tower, the cannon, the sky – these are the four principal figures in our final survey of Midgar taken a few kilometers aback from the mouth of the alley where Cloud was nearly run over just a minute ago.

Back in the streets, under the pipes and convexities of the former Shinra building, something is screeching into Sector One.

A hijacked train draws up to an industrial compound with alarming speed.

The track casts up a flourish of sparks and the train grinds to a halt at the gates of the oil refinery. Before security can make heads or tails of it, a man hiding his face behind a ski mask leaps out from the front car and cold cocks them both. Four more similarly masked individuals emerge.

One of the attackers, the largest of the bunch, signals for the others to follow him into the refinery. Valves are opened, gaskets are blown, alarms are sounded, lights are flashed, workers are evacuated, more guards are cold cocked, controls are sabotaged, and, at the heart of the facility, the large man and one of his accomplices are working to plant a massive time bomb programmed to go off in the next twenty minutes.

.

However, if we were to forget all that and instead continue to follow Cloud's movements, we'd find him on a meandering and aimless bike ride culminating in Sector Eight Square.

Sector Eight Square ("S.E. Square" to the locals) is a relic from one of the old towns bought up and incorporated into Midgar by Shinra. During the course of its transformation into Sector Eight, the town in question had its civic center plaza uprooted and reassembled hundreds of meters above ground level on the upper plate, where it was put on display as a pearl of local history (the old theater was particularly popular). Over the course of several years, the area degenerated into a breeding ground for drugs, prostitution and other social ills, as poverty in the Sector Eight slums grew too big to be quarantined under the streets.

However, while the civic virtue of the plaza had eroded over time, its golden age masonry had not -- a distinction cast in stark relief when the square was found standing alone in the sea of rubble Meteor had made out of everything else on the upper plate. And so it happened that, with the removal Midgar's top crust, Sector Eight Square was reunited with the ground once more. And while it may be in worse shape than ever, the square continues to stand the test of time as an example of the city's oldest architecture and a symbol of its perseverance.

But for Cloud, the value of this place stems from something more personal.

From the moment he arrived, a swarm of memories sprang forth and set upon the squalor of his surroundings, transmuting every piece of rubbish they touched: these were the black and white marble tiles that paved the ground like a chessboard; this was the fountain that had sat so precariously beneath a damaged power line; there was the clock-faced archway; that looked like the spot where she had tried to sell him a golden daffodil, before he told her to go away, to find someplace safe; that was… her?

No. Impossible. Never.

Yet there she stood, wearing the same pink dress, standing on the same corner and looking for customers.

Was it a miracle? Had she come back to him? Was it all over?

No, he had come back to her, back before it all began. This was two years ago in Sector Eight. He would do it over again, make things right this time around.

And he would start by buying one of her flowers.

The newly twenty-one-year-old man wandered across the street in a daze, fumbling through his pockets for a gil piece. Fishing out the gilded coin at last, he stepped forward and handed it to the flower girl.

"That's not enough," a famished voice croaked.

"Huh?"

"Forty gil an hour," she said, turning to face him.

It wasn't the flower girl.

Instead, Cloud was struck with a countenance tragic enough to rob a dog of its appetite. Sunken bloodshot eyes floated in a pasty cesspool of face, rudely stamped with lipstick and rogue (from the looks of it, her makeup could have very well been applied with a baseball bat). Beneath the neckline things did not fare much better: a cigarette burn featured here and there; violet bruises and livid lesions fearing further punishment peeked out cautiously from a tattered pink dress…

The illusion was shattered. Cloud was twenty-three years old again, standing before a pimp-beaten teenage prostitute with a face worn into that of an old woman.

This was reality.

Cloud emptied the contents of his pockets and thrust them into the miserable woman's bony hands. "Here, go buy yourself some soup or something," he sputtered, rushing around the corner before she could respond.

He vanished into a passing crowd and reappeared at a nearby bench, his hands shaking. He couldn't remember where he'd put his bike, nor did he particularly care. His thoughts were with the more immediate grotesque. The blotchy skin... the tattered dress… she looked like…

She looked like a corpse.

Cloud gagged and doubled over a storm drain where he proceeded to clear his head – and, more literally, his stomach.

One thing was for sure: Tifa's cherry pie certainly had a way of making of everything more agreeable.

The catharsis was crude but effective. Cloud spat out the remnants and rose to his feet feeling a great deal better.

Then he noticed the sign.

Cloud looked up and saw that he'd just been puking directly across from the old theater, whose weathered marquee still bore the name of that ubiquitous romance, "Loveless." From Cloud's particular vantage point, however, the sign was partially obstructed, resulting in the title reading simply as "Love." Somehow the word seemed to mock him.

Cloud sat back down and stared angrily on his feet.

Without warning, the sky blanched with a flash. A train of sound waves followed close behind, pulsing through the streets and rattling inside the ribcage of every vertebrate within a hundred meters. Black smoke billowed above the partition dividing Sectors Eight and One.

The oil refinery had gone up in flames.

Cloud stood up and decided then that this would be a good time to find his bike.


	4. Reality Television

A distant rumble shook the Seventh Heaven slightly enough to make the glassware to jitter. Accustomed to the tremors of minor earthquakes and passing trains, Tifa thought nothing of it and sat down at own her bar, flicking on a small, fuzzy television box she kept out sometimes for her customers. Following Reeve's request, she turned the dial to Channel Four and waited for whatever it was she was supposed to see.

It began officially when a mesh globe logo twinkling with computer-generated lens flare eclipsed the screen, accompanied by a prosaic fanfare of synthesized brass and timpani. A man with a scalp full of palm oil took the stage, smiling toothily as he sat down behind an affectedly professional-looking sort of table.

After the applause of the studio audience had died down, the host flashed a grin phony enough to put a bellhop to shame and launched into his nightly spiel.

HOST: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another installment of Limit Break, the talk show that knows no bounds. As always, I am your host, Bob Walker.

(The studio audience applauds obligingly.)

HOST: Tonight: the energy debate… will it ever end? Joining us to hopefully answer this question is an unlikely guest panel with an even unlikelier history, starting with the former head of Shinra's urban development program and current leader of the World Restoration Organization, Mr. Reeve Tuetsi.

REEVE: Hi.

HOST: Also here with us is former Shinra pilot and current oil investor Cid Highwind, joining the program from Rocket Town via satellite…

REEVE: Oil investor?!

HOST: Mr. Highwind, are you there?"

(A grizzled, stubbly face set against a generic backdrop appears onscreen.)

CID: Howdy Bob.

HOST: And last but not least, having recently completed a long and painful recovery from a tragic trucking accident two years ago, he's the former head of Shinra's space program and now president of the company, which he hopes to take in a new, ecologically sustainable direction – everybody please give a warm welcome to Mr. Arnold Palmer!

(The studio audience applauds obligingly.)

PALMER: Hey-hey!

HOST: Here you have it, ladies and gentlemen, this is what great television is all about: three different men, three different views on the most important issue of our time, and yet they all stem from a common past.

(Our Host Bob Walker turns to his guests.)

HOST: Gentlemen, I understand you three go way back…

CID: That's correct Bob.

HOST: Now, I'm familiar with this story, but could the three of you please explain it for the viewers? Mr. Tuesti, perhaps you would care to begin?

REEVE: Certainly.

HOST: Go ahead.

REEVE: Well, I used to work with Palmer on an almost daily basis when we were department heads at Shinra… and I met Cid when I was traveling with Avalanche.

HOST: Avalanche, huh? Pretty controversial stuff…

REEVE: Well… yes, but to be fair, by that point the group had completely reformed its objectives and methods…

HOST: Heh, of course… maybe they should have changed their name after they stopped being terrorists then?

(Cid clears his throat, producing a mighty roar of phlegm vulcanized by years of cigarette smoke.)

HOST: Mr. Highwind, is there something you'd care to add?

CID: Well Bob, if I can back things up for a minute, I'd like to point out that technically Reeve himself wasn't traveling with Avalanche, since he was communicating with us though a robot cat thing sitting on top of a robot moogle thing that the cat thing controlled with a megaphone, which Reeve controlled on his computer.

REEVE: And an additional control device implanted in my brain, if need be…

(Reeve strokes his beard with an air of self-satisfaction.)

HOST: Right.

CID: He called himself…. er, it, Cat Sith.

REEVE: It's Cait Sith, and technically he wasn't a real member of Avalance either, since I was using the Toyasaurus–

HOST: Toyasaurus?

REEVE: Yeah, you know, a big mechanical stuffed animal that tells fortunes…

HOST: Oh, one of those…

REEVE: Yes. Anyway, like I was saying, I... er, Cait Sith was never a real member of Avalanche, because I was actually using the Toyasaurus to go undercover for Shinra…

CID: But eventually you sided with us.

REEVE: Yes, I sided with you in order to provide Shinra with the information necessary for tracking down Sephiroth, that's what I said...

CID: Okay, but I'm talking about when you–

REEVE: So anyway, that's the story behind Cid and me.

HOST: Fascinating! And as if all these coincidences weren't enough, you, Mr. Highwind, had met with Mr. Palmer on several occasions to discuss Shinra's space program, isn't that right?

CID: That's correct Bob. In fact, fat man Palmer here came over to my place for tea the day I met Cait Sith… which was when he got smashed by that truck.

PALMER: Erm… maybe we should get on with the debate?

HOST: Right. Thank you, gentlemen, I'm sure you've cleared up a lot of questions for the viewers. Now, on to the debate: Mr. Highwind, would you care to start things off by sharing your thoughts on Midgar's so-called energy crisis?

CID: Well uh, I think oil's the future, see, because back in the day, when I was flying around for Shinra and all that, well, we used gasoline, and that worked out just fine if you ask me.

HOST: Powerful words from a powerful man.

CID: Thank you.

REEVE: Hang on a minute! You smoke a pack of cigarettes every day and you think you know what's best for the health of the Planet?

CID: Whoa there, little fella!

REEVE: "Little fella?"

CID: Uh sorry, it's just the cat thing… force of habit.

REEVE: Never mind, just tell me, have you read any of the pamphlets I've been sending you?

CID: Well, uh, Shera always gets the mail over here, you see, and…

REEVE: If you read any of them, you'd know that the combustion of fossil fuels releases heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere, resulting in a worldwide increase in temperature that could prove fatal to the delicate balance of life on this Planet! In fact, scholars from Cosmo Canyon have proven beyond a doubt that for the first time in history, the Great Glacier beneath Gaea's Cliff has begun to melt!

PALMER: I concur. Mako energy is a far superior choice, especially in light of Shinra's latest breakthrough, Mako 2…

REEVE: You can't concur with me! I disagree with everything you stand for!

PALMER: Just because you don't concur with me doesn't mean I can't concur with you!

CID: I believe he's got you there.

HOST: All right gentlemen, cool your jets. Please, Mr. Palmer, tell us more about this "Mako 2."

PALMER: Thank you Bob. Like I was saying, our team of expert scientists at the Shinra Company have recently developed 'Mako 2', an extremely innovative re-envisioning of our original mako formula that burns with ninety-five percent greater efficiency, ranking higher on environmental standard tests than anything produced by Ibsen Oil.

HOST: Amazing. That doesn't sound anything like the old mako...

PLAMER: No siree Bob.

REEVE: This is absurd! Just to let everyone know, Mr. Palmer here supports taking the stuff that made us alive here today and burning it for fuel!

PALMER: There is absolutely no evidence suggesting–

REEVE: No evidence? What about the Lifestream coming out of the ground to–

PALMER: Ha! I knew you'd drop the L-word sooner or later. You see, folks, it's because of tree-hugging hippies like Mr. Tuesti that this kind of superstitious New Age crap has become such a widespread urban myth in Midgar these days!

REEVE: Excuse me?!

HOST: Um, gentlemen, now of course this program is all about pushing limits, but please try to refrain from personal attacks.

CID: Yeah, good luck trying to get Palmer to shut his fat mouth.

PALMER: Don't say fat!

HOST: Gentlemen!!

**_– We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news report! –_**

Without warning, the spectacle changed shape before Tifa's eyes. The vaporous blah blah of political punditry solidified into stark images of steel melting flaccid **_–_** ripplingtumors of smoke pouring up into the sky **_– _**black-faced firefighters struggling to subdue the towering inferno…

_"What you're seeing now is footage taken live from the Ibsen oil refinery in Sector One, where some kind of explosion has occurred just minutes ago. We have received unconfirmed reports that the explosion was caused by a group of terrorists, possibly the Ghadma Liberation Front, which as you will recall attacked another Ibsen refinery earlier this year in Bone Village. Again, we stress that these reports are unconfirmed…"_

Tifa didn't hear anymore than that. Her ears were dulled by an awful thought, which had begun in her gut, climbed up her throat, and seized her brain.

Barret was supposed to be working near the refinery that evening.


	5. Monastics and Missionaries

After witnessing the refinery bombing from S.E. Square, Cloud got back on his bike and headed home. No heroic rush to the site of disaster, no swooping in to save the day... he just went home.

Having already established Cloud's relationship with his room at the Seventh Heaven, the reader may be wondering what exactly constituted "home" for the ex-Soldier at this time.

Home was an abandoned chapel in Sector Five, Aeris' former the sanctuary. Yet what had once been Aeris' church had now become more like the Church of Aeris, seeing how Cloud used it to worship the very ground she had trod. In all fairness, it was something of a magical ground: the flowers blooming from the shattered choir came out of the only arable soil in the city.

Midgar's infertility is nothing new. For decades now, nothing has grown in or near there. The city has abused its environment with such ferocity that the Planet has withdrawn its Lifestream from that part of the land almost entirely. This one of the Planet's most basic defense mechanisms, conducive to Nature's survival in two ways: firstly, it protects its resources by diverting them from areas of excess consumption; secondly, it acts the biological equivalent of a scorched earth policy, in which the land is made barren to starve the occupying parasites until they learn more sustainable ways or perish.

The evolution of the Planet's immune system, however, had not been able to keep pace with the evolution of human technology: Mako reactors could siphon channels of Lifestream from thousands of miles away, while advances in trade and infrastructure allowed vegetable products to be imported from anywhere in the world. Thus globalization trumped the globe, and the parasites lived on in their ivory towers while their plagued subjects starved on the scorched earth below.

Yet for all this, a simple flower girl by the name of Aeris Gainsborough had been able to revive a small mound of earth beneath the floorboards of an abandoned church in the slums. Acheiving this didn't require any trick of science; only honest love and goodwill. With these simple virtues, the flower girl succeeded in winning back the trust of the Planet, which, after sensing the pure intentions residing over that particular patch of dirt, allowed a few discreet veins of Lifestream to flow into it.

All of this goes to support the most fundamental concept in the Cetra philosophy. It is a concept that continues to elude much of modern man, perhaps on account of its profound simplicity: to redeem a land in ruin, the people must redeem themselves in the eyes of the land; to receive the Planet's grace, the people must show grace to the Planet. These practices ultimately stem from the Cetra's beleif that our relationship to the Universe is firmly reciprocal: those who declare themselves exempt from this rule and demand something for nothing in return effectively exempt themselves from the Planet's benefaction and ultimately get nothing.

Today, two years after the flower girl's departure from this world, her flowers continue to thrive in that same church in the slums. This is her legacy, her testament to the reciprocal Universe. Her loving touch has created happy dirt, which continues to create happy flowers, which in turn bring happiness to everyone and everything they come in contact with.

To be in the presence of these flowers comforted Cloud as well. They had something divine about them, a sacred fragrance able to revive forgotten impressions and feelings as only smells can. There was a cleansing, almost forgiving quality to the scent; perhaps because the flowers themselves had been born from the Planet's redeemed trust and forgiveness, they in turn imparted some of that absolution through their nectar.

Whatever the reason, Cloud turned to the aura and aroma of these blossoms to escape from his own weakness. This proved to be a treacherous habit, however, as his increasing dependence on the ritual only served to make him weaker. In a damning Catch-22, Cloud's cowardly retreat to the church had sprung from his desire to escape his own cowardice. It had become an addiction, his decadent respite. The church was his opium den, the daffodils his poppies.

It was in this state of mind that Cloud now entered the chapel, ready to escape as he did every night into relics of an expired happiness.

Instead he found something else.

"I thought I might find you here," a gruff voice spoke.

"Red?"

Indeed, standing before Cloud was none other than Red XIII. His journey through the badlands of Midgar had all been leading to this end.

"Hello," he said, flicking his candle-tufted tail behind him. "Long time no see."

Cloud didn't return the greeting, nor did he care to. He simply looked at the creature in front of him, waiting for it to say whatever it had come to say and leave him be.

Before proceeding any further, a few things should be said about Red XIII:

An erudite beast native to Cosmo Canyon, Red XIII is believed to be the last of his species. His real name is Nanaki, which loosely translated means "one who discovers." As per tradition, he received this name shortly after birth, having its character etched and colored into his left shoulder. From there the rest of his life reads similarly across his body. On his hindquarters, a repeated symbol measuring the years marks his passage into early adulthood. His valor as a warrior is shown plainly on his face, where an orb shaped from turquoise stands in for the eye lost to one of the Gi tribe's obsidian blades.

But the most painful account is written in the flesh of Nanaki's left leg, not far from his original birth name. Just as he had received his name and markings from his own tribe, so was he subjected to a similar set of rites after being inducted into another sort of tribe. Their elder, Professor Hojo, decided then to give him a name and marking of his own design: "Red XIII, as indicated by the numeral printed on the specimen's left foreleg, above that other gibberish."

Captivity was hell. During those days at the lab, Nanaki learned to regard torture and suffering as routine. For ten months he survived like this, until the day when Cloud and the rest of Avalanche happened along by chance and set him free.

At the present moment, however, it is Red XIII who finds Cloud captive, and in a prison of his own making at that. He is his own jailer; the crumbling church is his dungeon. His cell is a small spot on the nave, made habitable with the addition of a sleeping bag, kerosene lantern, and a few other provisions.

"Interesting place you've got here," Red remarked dryly, looking up at the gaping hole where Cloud originally had made his entrance two years ago. "Seeing how you're so fond of reliving the past, I don't suppose you've tried falling a few hundred feet through the roof..."

"Well the upper-plate's gone now, so I guess that option's off the table."

"You're joking, right?"

No answer.

"Incredible…" Red shook his locks in astonishment. "Have you really become so irrational to believe that emulating the conditions of your first meeting will bring about another?"

Cloud's voice cracked slightly. "It could work if hit the ground hard enough."

Red fell silent.

"Now," Cloud began impatiently, "would you mind telling me what you're doing here?"

"I came here to see you."

"And?"

"And I see that you haven't made any progress since we last spoke. How long has it been now?"

Cloud thought back to his last visit to Cosmo Canyon. He'd gone there year ago looking for answers, only to walk away with nothing but a stale batch of psuedo-philisophical aphorisms from the newly appointed village elder.

That elder was Nanaki. The two of them haven't spoken since.

"Yeah," he said, "it's been a while."

"And here you are no different from then, still clinging in vain to things that have already come and gone."

Cloud had neither the energy nor the motivation to argue on this point. "It feels like it's been longer than two years," he lamented, falling against on one of the pews. "Much longer."

"We had some great adventures together," Red added on a higher note, mitigating his tone as Cloud gave ground. "There are times when I myself wish it were possible to go back and relive those moments."

Cloud muttered some inaudible rebuff.

"It's true! I learned a lot back then."

"Didn't we all… "

"You know, Cloud, although I tried to be your teacher for a while, the truth is that you've been a teacher to me first."

"How do you figure that?"

"On our journey, two years ago… I was planning to stay in the canyon with Grandfather, until he told me to go with you."

Cloud leaned back in the pew and yawned. "I guessed as much…"

"He said that no matter what happens, we must still try. He told me that we have to keep fighting for this Planet, even if we can't save it…"

There was a solemn pause.

"And he told me that I would learn this best from following you," said Red.

Cloud groaned. "All right, what do you want?"

"I've been thinking about what Grandfather said to me that day… what he said about defending our world. You probably haven't noticed, but the Planet's cries are starting to get louder again."

"And you came here because you want my help, right?"

The distantly hopeful expression on Red XIII's face answered for him.

"Forget it," Cloud snarled, waving his arm as if to shoo him away like a stray mutt. "There's nothing I can do about it, okay?"

Red's expression remained firmly unchanged. "Bugenhagen believed in you… are you going to betray the faith he carried with him to his deathbed? You were supposed to inspire me not to give up, not the other way around!"

"I'm sorry, I just can't do it anymore." Cloud pressed his head into his hands. "It's just too much… too much for a world without any joy left in it."

"Hrm…" Red sighed with equal measures of disapproval and disappointment. "Do you recall much about Vincent Valentine?"

"What kind of a question is that? Of course I remember him, he fought with us till the end!"

"Then tell me this: why did he do it? What joy what was there left for him in this world? What happiness did he possess that was worth defending?"

Cloud shrugged in his usual manner. "I don't know."

"You don't know because all you can think of is your own gratification," Red answered in a biting tone. "Vincent on the other hand, he fought for something greater… I suggest you ask him about it sometime."

"If you think that weirdo is such a saint why don't you go ask him for help?"

"He already did."

A flash of crimson dropped from the rafters overhead, landing almost weightlessly on the nave.

"Vincent!" Cloud's face went as red as the man's cape. "If I'd known you were here–"

"Don't worry about it," he cut in with his clipped way of speaking. "I've been called worse."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"Hm…" He took a moment to genuinely ponder the question. "Guess that's just my style. Sorry."

Some words on Vincent Valentine:

Like Nanaki, Vincent had been captured and abused by Professor Hojo before being found by Avalanche. And while Cloud and his friends were able to salvage him from his coffin, a part of Vincent will always be in that dungeon, sleeping under cursed thoughts. Twenty years of slumber and torment have left the former Turk considerably withdrawn. He seldom speaks, and when he does the words drag like bottle caps against his throat. He moves through this life with the detachment of a phantom, regarding everything as though from another plane entirely. His chin is tucked in his mantle and his brow is wrapped; what can be seen of his face falls somewhere in between. Black jagged hair hangs in random fractions over the completed portrait.

In spite of his reclusive ways, some interesting trivia concerning the former Turk still pops up every now and then. For example, it has been gathered that Vincent prefers red to white wine. Some might dismiss this information as a no-brainer, arguing that any idiot could have guessed as much from Vincent's obvious identification with the color red – and perhaps they'd be right. But how many of these people, I wonder, have also considered that he may just as easily identify with anything that's been plucked from youth, chemically altered, barreled up in a cellar, and left to age for a few decades before finally being released? When we refrain from rushed conclusions, even the most seemingly insignificant clues can tell the entire story of a man's life (then again, maybe he just likes the taste).

Incidentally, Vincent also enjoys dark chocolate, classical guitar, and roses with their thorns intact... but we won't be going into any of that.

Let us instead return to him at the present moment, joined by Red XIII in the Sector Five church.

At this point they'd given up whatever hope they had of recruiting Cloud to their cause. What chance did they have of persuading him when he wouldn't even hear them out? Red XIII therefore decided then to move on with Plan B, asking Cloud how they might go about getting in contact with Barret and Tifa.

"They're still at the Seventh Heaven," he explained, "but good luck trying to get them to go along with any crazy schemes. They're busy with their own things."

"It won't hurt to try," Red rejoined subtly. "Besides, I'm sure we can at least find some lodging with them."

"Yeah, you can take my room… it's not like I use it or anything."

"Aha. Very well. But before we go, there's something I have for you."

Just then Vincent produced something from his cape and handed it to Red XIII, who took the object up in his mouth and placed at Cloud's feet.

Cloud humbly knelt down to retrieve it.

"Why are you giving me this?"

"Something to think about," answered Red XIII. "We'll be at the Seventh Heaven if you need us. Until then… take care, old friend."

"You too," Cloud murmured, still fixated on the gift as Red XIII and Vincent took their leave.

A moment later he was left alone with his relics as usual.


	6. Chronicles of Cloud's Enlightenment

Settling back into solitude, Cloud sat in the flowerbed and ruminated on Red XIII's gift. He dangled the artifact by its tether, studying the craftsmanship as it turned slowly in suspension. It was an amulet of sorts, a talisman on a black leather cord designed to be worn from the neck. The pendant was a small willow hoop, bent around a web of string woven into complex radial patterns. Baby phoenix feathers and beads worked from materia crystals served for decoration.

Cloud knew these features well; this was the second time it had been given to him.

His original possession of the artifact owes to a series of events beginning two years ago, when Avalanche's quest to save the Planet culminated in a journey to the center of the Planet itself through a very big and very weird hole in the ground known as the Northern Crater.

If Nature is to be personified as a mother, then the Northern Cater is the way leading to her womb. To plumb its depths to undergo reverse birth, following a path that reaches into the mystery of life itself. As far as journeys into the unknown go, the only thing that rates with the crater is outer space.

The depths of the Planet and the depths of the cosmos aren't all that different, actually. Consider how telescopes are capable of looking back in time: If astronomers want to retrieve an older picture of a celestial body, they do so by simply looking deeper into space – a phenomenon suggesting that we mere mortals might be able to observe the nativity of the Universe if our vision were somehow able to be extended by a great enough distance. Concordantly, what applies looking outward from the Planet also applies when looking inward: to travel further into the Northern Crater is to go that much further back into the history of creation.

At first, passing through the first hundred fathoms or so, the crater seems to be little more than a big empty bowl of dry rock. Do not be fooled by such appearances; they are but the final strains of gravity before ascending into orbit. The precipice is closer than you probably think.

At length the first signs appear, albeit so subtly that they register only as tremors in your intuition. You sense something "off" about the scenery: it could be something in the geology; maybe an unfamiliar shade of mineral, or some unusual rock formation. The trend progresses parallel to your descent, and by turns you find yourself witness to increasingly improbable phenomena with increasing regularity. Impossibilities that might pass for anomalies approach the limits of explanation. And then, like a revelation, the trend reaches a critical tipping point, and suddenly this world is no longer that world. The crater's natural wonders have grown so wondrous that they exceed their category and enter the supernatural. Skeletons with spines mistakable for spiral staircases, fossilized blades of grass taller than flagpoles, sagacious mushrooms containing knowledge older than mankind, chunks of rock floating in the air like breadcrumbs, a mosaic terrain formed from the tops of rectangular stone columns bound in a radiant green ether – these are but a few of the sublime visions one might find retracing Avalanche's journey through the Northern Crater.

What this has to do with Cloud and the pendant from Red XIII will become clear in a moment.

While all of Avalanche came within narrow proximity of the Planet's core, Cloud went even further than that: he touched the source. It happened shortly after Sephiroth's final defeat in the material world: his fleeting spirit pulled Cloud down with it like a drowning man, dragging them through a network of metaphysical planes until they stood on the membrane between reality and the yolk from which it derives its shape.

The nature of this realm is something we can only understand in abstracts. While the Universe has spread and expanded from a point of infinite density, the center from which Planet life radiates can be understood as a point of infinite immaturity. What does such a point consist of? Is it pregnant with infinity, like the egg of the ovulists? Perhaps it's an empty a kernel, containing only the fertile nothingness of pre-creation. As with any good collapsing of dimensions, every theorist has his or her own ideas regarding the singularity at the center of the Planet. There's a great deal of argument on how it operates, what it does or doesn't imply about our existence, and – someone always has to ask – what might happen to the poor schmuck who falls into it. But as Cloud and Sephiroth their last battle on the event horizon of that very singularity, vanishing into the abyss was not the topic of a riddle for rainy day; it was a distinct possibility for either of them… and a certainty for one.

That one was Sephiroth.

And so it happened that Cloud became the only living being known to ever return from the other side. What's more, he came back from the brink of oblivion -- as people often to do -- with a revelation: he had received an answer from the Planet.

His exacts words were:

"The Promised Land… I think I can meet her… there."

Just as Avalanche's campaign to save the world came to an end, with those words Cloud had begun another quest.

Personal journeys, however, would have to wait. That night Armageddon came to Midgar, leaving the city and its people in ruin. Cloud was therefore compelled to put aside all thoughts of pilgrimage and join Barret and Tifa in their devotion to the relief effort.

Tifa, being a tender young woman with a strong will, chose to work at a few shelters, where she soon came to enjoy the act of bringing comfort and nourishment to the community.

Barret, being a big burly man with a background in manual labor, replaced his gun arm with a more practical prosthetic and lent a newly forged hand to Midgar's restoration as a construction worker.

Cloud, being a directionless young man not so sure what to do with himself, decided to make wandering his vocation and bike around town, acting as a courier for immobile citizens.

Within a year the city was well on the way to recovery. Barret and Tifa, having settled into their roles rather comfortably, decided to stay in Midgar and continue their current work. Cloud considered the prospect of following suit and becoming a full-time delivery boy, but deep down he knew that could never happen.

Not when the Promised Land was still out there.

When Cloud stood on the cusp of the singularity a year before, the Planet had shown him an alternative to existence governed by arbitrary and cruel dichotomies such as life and death. It had shown him a place where the spirit is exalted above the constant regurgitation and rearrangement of raw energy and dead matter. It had shown him the Promised Land.

But like a dream, this revelation had been entirely visceral, leaving Cloud in its wake with no present knowledge other than a memory of what it had felt like to have once known, a knowledge which holds no truth beyond blind faith. He couldn't remember the vision, only having the vision… and those words, "I think I can meet her there," what did they mean? What had possessed him to say that?

So in the end, the sacred answer from the Planet turned out to be just another riddle to bait Cloud's brain at night. It became clear to him then that if he ever wanted to be at peace, he would have to follow his vision of the Promised Land to its full conclusion.

And if that didn't work out, he could always fall back on the delivery boy gig.

.

.

.

It was a typical orange-violet evening in Cosmo Canyon. The village sat peacefully atop its rocky red mesa, overlooking the great valley below. Windmills gyrated at a dependable and leisurely pace; the electric torches strung throughout the village burned with clean renewable energy. On the highest plateau stood the planetarium and observatory of the late village elder Bugenhagen, who'd bequeathed all this and his title to his grandson Nanaki.

At the present moment Nanaki was curled up on a hemp mat continuing his reading of James L.'s "Gaia Hypothesis." He was just about to finish the section titled "Climate Change" when a sudden knock at the door severed his attention span.

"Just a seco–"

Before he could answer, a wind-blasted weed of a man plowed through the entrance and collapsed on the first piece of furniture he could find.

Nanaki approached the intruder hesitantly. "Um… may I help you?"

He looked like an absolute mess: the sweat covering his body had been leavened to mud by dusty winds, his bare arms were striped with passage through thorny brush, and the folds and recesses in the knees of his pants had become bulging pockets of dirt and debris. His massive head of hair hung over his face like a shredded yellow cat.

"Cloud?"

"Red…" He swept the blonde tangle from his eyes. "I would've called, but I didn't have your number."

"Um, we don't have any telephones here…"

"Oh," Cloud answered between gasps, "right..."

Nanaki (henceforth Red [XIII], as Cloud preferred to call him) slid an earthen pot of drinking water to his guest, who dispatched the liquid offering with mechanical efficiency. After giving him another moment to recover, Red went about dispensing with the most obvious question:

"Tell me, friend, why have you come here?"

"I'm searching," said Cloud.

"Oh? For what?"

"I guess you could say I'm looking to understand the Planet a little better."

"Well you've certainly come to the right place," Said Red, puffing with pride. "What is it you wish to know?"

"Everything you've got. Sign me up for the full program."

The flippancy of these words gave Red XIII considerable pause.

"Well," he began, "I suppose we can get you started on a basic crash course, and if all goes well from there, we can proceed…"

"Okay–"

"_However,_" he added sharply, "don't think for a moment that any of this is going to be easy!"

Cloud pledged his commitment in sweeping terms, all but falling to his knees and swearing on his grandmother's bones that he would give a million and ten percent.

Red frowned to hear such hyperbolic nonsense. "Might I ask where all this enthusiasm has come from?" he inquired suspiciously.

Cloud was silent now; his next words would have to be chosen very carefully. Red wasn't looking for babbling oaths and hasty promises; he was looking the truth. If Cloud wanted to convince him that he was serious about becoming a student of the canyon, he'd have to give him a genuine reason why.

Cloud delved deep inside himself and came up with the most sincere answer he could think of:

"Well, uh, I guess… I guess I want to get to know the Planet better, to be closer to what matters to me most, you know?"

"I see… " Red XIII made a pensive growling sound and squeezed his eye shut. He stayed that way for a while, meditating deliberately until he reached a decision. "Very well," he said at last, his eye opening again. "I, Nanaki, chief elder of Cosmo Canyon, welcome you to our village as my disciple."

And that is how Cloud began his new life under the tutelage of Red XIII (who was just starting out himself in the role of teacher). To make it official, Cloud was granted full membership in the tribe, an honor ceremonially conferred upon him with the Bawaajige Nagwaagan (also called the "Cosmo badge"), a woven pendant worn from the neck to signify one's status as a student of Planet life.

That was the first time it had been given to him.

.

.

Cloud first lesson took place in Bugenhagen's planetarium, a small dusty attic capable of transforming into entire galaxies with the flick of a switch.

Upon being activated, the machine's hologram projector hummed to life and a hydraulic lift raised Cloud and Red XIII into a sphere of simulacrum overhead. Gone now were the walls and ceiling; here was only the illusion of pure and limitless space, measured by only by the occasional outline of an ellipse.

When the visuals were finished rendering, Red XIII launched into the body of his lecture:

"Two years ago, Grandfather told you about the cycle of life observed within the schema of this Planet. What he didn't tell you is that this cycle is in fact present in _all_ things."

The simulacrum zeroed in on the surface of the Planet, zooming through the atmosphere to reveal the abstract representation of a man.

"Take ourselves for example: just as the Planet provides a home for us, so do we host an endless number of microscopic organisms inside our bodies."

The holographic man's featureless form was rendered transparent to reveal a network of energy circulating through him.

"The collective flow of these organisms inside us constitutes something like the Lifestream: it heals our pains and fights off sickness, maintains growth and facilitates reproduction. The cycle of Planet life is thus paralleled by a cycle inside of ourselves, and within this cycle there is another, and another, continuing in this pattern forever. You could say that ontology recapitulates cosmogony."

Though he wasn't quite sure what all that meant, Cloud held his tongue as the simulacrum shifted focus from micro to macrocosmos.

Red XIII proceeded accordingly with the next phase of his lecture:

"Now, if we turn our attentions outward, we see that the Planet, like ourselves, is also part of a greater cycle. Just as we have a soul, so does the Planet. Just as we die and return to it, so shall it too one day expire and return to the Universe. Moreover, the Planet is subject to the same vulnerabilities we are: it suffers injuries such as Meteor, contracts diseases such as Jenova–"

Cloud interrupted: "Wait, so are you saying that big things like the Planet are following the pattern of the microscopic stuff, or is the other way around?"

"Neither," answered Red. "In the reciprocal Universe there is no hierarchy, no such thing as big or small–"

"Yeah, I get how that works as a metaphor and all, but seriously, we're talking about microscopic organisms versus the size of an entire Planet."

"Let… let me explain," Red began, taken aback by a bluntness he wasn't used to. "If you fly an airship in a straight line, you can only go so far before you come full circle and end up back where you started, right? The world isn't flat and neither is the Universe. You can only look so far inside before you find yourself looking outward. Within us are cycles containing smaller cycles, a pattern that goes infinitely. And infinity includes everything, even this Planet! The whole Universe resides at the center our being, just as we reside at its center. Everything is reciprocal."

As he heard this, Cloud's hand had inadvertently begun to wander toward the middle of his chest – his own center – whereupon his fingers were greeted by something light and feathery. He looked down and saw them fumbling over the delicate weaving of the Bawaajige Nagwaagan – circles within circles.

Though his hand might have been swayed, Cloud was still reluctant.

"I don't know," he murmured.

"If you let your mind be at peace, you will be able to undo opposition, reconcile the most impossible-seeming of ideas–"

"Let my mind be at peace? You mean I should stop thinking, so I don't realize how crazy all of this is!"

Red XIII shook his head censoriously. "Is critical thinking the only way of thinking that you know?"

Cloud wasn't sure.

.

.

Having gotten off to a shaky start, Cloud's second lesson took place on the clean slate of a windswept plateau near the village.

"Today we're going to try something a little different," Red XIII announced. "It occurred to me yesterday that you might have an easier time grasping certain concepts if we work on your listening skills first."

Cloud remained unenthusiastic as he sat in the instructed meditation stance.

"Trust me," said Red XIII, "listening to the Planet is the best way of understanding it,"

"Listening to the Planet… like Aeris used to?"

"That's right."

The ex-Soldier's Mako eyes lit up. "What are we waiting for then? Let's start right now!"

Red sighed. It had become clear by then that Cloud's desire to learn was conditional to an altogether different purpose.

He went on with the lesson resignedly: "Patience, my friend. If you wish to hear the voice of the Planet you must first learn to quiet your thoughts."

Restoring focus by example, Red XIII led Cloud through a series of controlled breathing techniques.

"Now, before we begin, tell me... what is it that you desire most?"

"It's personal…"

"Well whatever it is, you must learn to let go of it. To listen the Planet, you must first surrender any attachments you have in connection with your own life. Otherwise you won't be able to sense anything beyond yourself."

"There are certain attachments I can't let go of," Cloud protested.

"Why not?"

"I don't know, aren't there some things worth hanging on to? Aren't there things that deserve our loyalty?"

Red hit back with a question of his own: "Can an attachment truly be called loyal if you don't have the power to relinquish it?"

"Maybe, I don't know. I can't tell my heart what to feel."

"Yes, you can!"

"No," Cloud laughed bitterly, "never."

.

.

.

The moon seemed deliberately positioned over the church that evening. It poured its light through the ragged breach in the roof, casting Cloud and the flowerbed in a silver-blue medallion.

He looked up from the pendant in his hand to the stars above. After all these years, his answer remained the same.

"Never…"


	7. Enter Wheelchair Man

"Ratatatatatatatatat!"

"Reggie, I'm hit!"

"Do a barrel roll!"

"She can't take it!"

"Mayday! Mayday!"

"Johnson, noooooo!"

"Nyyyrrrrrraaaooo–"

"Kapoooooosh!"

_"Mr. President, there's a call waiting for you on the videophone."_

Arnold Palmer scrambled to put the model airships back on his desk and bring the whirl of his swivel chair to a halt.

"I'm busy!" the corpulent executive shouted through a mouthful of milk and cookies.

_"But, ah, sir, it's a code red!"_

"Code red?" The Shinra president sprayed crumbs all over the intercom. "Why didn't you say that in the first place? For Pete's sake, put them through!"

Only two kinds of calls were assigned code red priority: pizza deliveries and the boss.

_"Hello Mr. President," _a chilly voice croaked through the speakers.

So much for pizza.

Palmer reluctantly looked to the wall-mounted monitor and saw a man whose face was almost entirely cast in shadow, obscured in the recesses of a white blanket.

"Sir! I, I… wasn't expecting you!"

_"I'm calling to congratulate you on your television appearance tonight."_

"You liked it?"

_"What's there not to like? Nothing earns the people's respect like a fat, vulgar, sophomoric buffoon!"_

"Don't say 'fat!'" whined Palmer.

The blanket fluttered with a sigh of frustration. "_I could call you names all night and it wouldn't amount to a fraction of the insult you've dealt me with your behavior!"_

And with that, he switched his video signal to a live news feed, showing a clip from that night's preempted broadcast of "Limit Break with Bob Walker." In this particular clip, Mr. Palmer's debate with Reeve Tuesti had already degenerated into a shouting match, coming to a head with the Shinra President springing from his seat and patting it provocatively at the opposition in a rather tasteless gesture.

The man in white provided his own audio commentary.

_"Is this what you thought I had in mind when I said the Mako industry needs a new image?"_

"He had it coming!"

_"Funny, I was thinking the same thing about you in respect to, oh, let's say another 'tragic trucking accident…'"_

"Please sir, anything but that!" The rotund man flapped and flailed as he fell out of his chair and kowtowed before the image onscreen. "Please! I beg you!"

_"Just something to keep in mind the next time you feel the urge to make an ass out of yourself."_

"Y-yes sir."

At that moment the news feed, as though satisfied with this answer, called off its footage of Palmer's gaffe proceeded with the number one story of the evening: the Ibsen refinery bombing.

_"Ah, now you see that?" _The man in white rasped with satisfaction over pictures of the inferno. "_There's an example to follow. A shame that I can't use my bombers for public representation. Unlike you, they know something about professional discipline!"_

Palmer held his jowels high and flashed a ham-handed salute. "Yessir, more discipline sir, sure thing sir, be more like the bombers…"

_"Let's hope for your sake the stir they caused enough stir to draw enough attention from your idiocy to prevent the company from degenerating into a complete laughing stock. Now go on and get out of my sight, you pathetic brown-nosing pig!"_

"Yessir, less brown-nosing, whatever you say…"

_"Ugh… goodnight, 'Mr. President.'"_

And with that, the transmission ended. Palmer fell back in his chair and practically exhaled his entire body weight.

"Damn…"

He wiped a torrent of sweat from his patchy head and reached into his desk for some pain pills; he'd developed quite the taste for them while recovering from the truck incident.

.

.

.

The man in the white switched off the videophone in of disgust. Keeping his blood pressure in check, he calmly reminded himself that Palmer was not a complete liability; although an idiot, at least his vulgar buffoonery has a way of ingratiating him with a public that mostly consisted of similar idiots.

_After all, does not the word 'vulgar' belong to the same family as 'vulgus,' meaning 'general public?'_

He leaned back on his wheelchair and gazed idly at the bookshelves stacked around the study. The glow of paraffin lighting lent an eerie sort of warmth to their moldering knowledge.

A dull knock sounded from the chamber door, echoing throughout the catacombs of Shinra Manor.

"Enter!"

At his master's command, a bald, brawny man in a blue two-piece suit stepped into the study.

"Excuse me sir. There's someone here to see you."

"Show him in, Rude."

With a curt nod, the former Turk went to fetch his master's visitor, a shivering leaf of a man who felt then as if he were being shown through an attraction at the Gold Saucer's Haunted Hotel – first past the anteroom, with its grim collection of scientific equipment inherited from none other than Professor Hojo; then through a dimly lit corridor, decked end to end with a thousand battered volumes containing information on everything from Mako infusion to Gast's Jenova Project; and then, finally, into the office of the master himself.

"And who might you be?" the man in white asked, grimacing beneath his hood at the knock-kneed patsy quivering before him.

"H-hello sir, m-my name is Wesley Robinson," the patsy stammered. "I'm here to see a Mr. W.C. Mann."

"Ah, yes… Rude, you may leave us."

The former Turk exited promptly, shutting the door behind him with an ominous thud.

Sealed inside like a condemned man, the already awkward Mr. Robinson felt somewhat uneasy being left alone with a stranger who resembled a talking blanket.

"You'll have to forgive me for not standing to greet you," the lame man deadpanned.

"Y-yes, Mr. Mann."

"Tell me, Mr. Robsinon, what brings you here?"

"The Department of Veteran Affairs in Midgar... they said you could help me."

"I see. I take it you served in SOLDIER?"

"Th-that's right. Third Class."

The man in white nodded sympathetically. "Yes, I'm afraid these times haven't been kind to you and your fellow veterans, have they, Mr. Robinson?"

"I don't know even where to begin!" Wesley sputtered. "Ever since SOLDIER went away, I haven't been able to hold down a job, and my wife took the kids, and left me, and–"

"And those ghastly modifications made to your body chemistry, surely they have caused you a great deal of pain as well?"

"Oh, it's awful! I can't sleep, I always have these nightmares, the Mako in my eyes is always burning, and I have dizzy spells all the time, and–"

"You're quite right, Mr. Robinson, that truly is awful! I'm terribly sorry for all of this, truly, which is why you've been sent here..."

"What do you mean?"

"What if I told you that the Shinra Company could find a way to repay, even cure you?"

Wesley nearly collapsed for joy. "Oh! Mr. Mann, please, you've got to, I need this so bad, you have to–"

"Please, Mr. Robinson, calm yourself. You'll get what's coming to you, soon enough… now, if you would return to the room behind you, we can begin the physical examination as soon as the doctor arrives."

Wesley thanked his mysterious benefactor and headed back into the anteroom with the laboratory equipment he'd seen earlier. Although he knew next to nothing about this W.C. Mann character, one thing was certain: whoever he was, he was no stranger to suffering. Perhaps Mr. Mann had been a fellow soldier himself at one point, before becoming disfigured in some battle. Perhaps that's what motivated his work, Wesley thought, to help his fellow veterans in need. And while all this was just speculation, deep down Wesley felt that Mr. Mann was a kindred spirit, someone who could be counted on like family. In fact, Mr. Robinson felt so much at home that his trembling and stuttering ceased almost entirely, and he hardly seemed fazed when Mr. Rude came in to relieve him of his red shirt and help him into the so-called "medical capsule," a monstrosity that looked more like a relic of alchemy than any tool of modern medicine. At the heart of the device was a large iron casket for containing the subject; this main chamber fed into four smaller ones, all interconnected by copper tubing. Two leather bellows, an aneroid barometer, at least five rotary valves, and three Erlenmeyer bulbs completed the apparatus. The machine sat in its entirety over a brick hearth.

The man in white rolled in to observe the procedure. "This device will extract the Jenova cells from your body," he explained in a clam and assuring voice. "Once this is accomplished, your health problems should disappear entirely."

Wesley struggled to hold back the tears. "Thank you sir… thank you so much."

"I assure you, Mr. Robinson, the pleasure is mine."

And with that, Rude closed the hatch, a fire was lit beneath, the bellows began to heave, the flasks began to boil, and a rotating head of blades was lowered into the capsule like a giant immersion blender, pureeing Wesley Robinson alive. The wheelchair-bound man had delivered on both his promises; Wesley's ailments were lost in the soup with the rest of him, and the contraption, functioning as a giant still, proved most successful in filtering the Jenova cells from his liquid remains – twenty ounces, to be precise. Once these cells were extracted, everything else could be drained directly into the mansion's septic system.

"No wonder Shinra's empire has fallen," the man in white exclaimed. "Look at carrion we had stinking up our ranks!"

When the extraction was finished, Rude seized the yield and connected it to a catheter, feeding the precious green juice intravenously into his master's decaying arm. This pleased the invalid greatly, relieving him of his pains and even shrinking some of the flesh-eating cancer around the site of injection.

These effects were short-lived. The cancer was quick to retaliate, and within five minutes of treatment the benefits had already vanished.

The man in white crumpled his necrotic hand into a fist. "Damn it… no good."

"Would you care to interview another candidate, sir?"

"No. Tell the company that the only Soldiers I want are those strong enough to serve in my army. Scraps like Mr. Robinson here are good for little more than brain food for you and your siblings… "

"But sir, what about your condition?"

"Ordinary Soldiers are no longer effective. I need something… someone stronger."

Rude's expression was grim. "How shall we obtain this person?"

"He's too strong to be taken in by force, but…" The man in white suddenly felt a wicked grin spread across his crackled lips. "But perhaps it can be arranged for him to come to us."

Although the basement of Shinra Manor boasted an extensive collection of cobwebs, the biggest spider of them all was just beginning to weave a snare of his own.


	8. After Hours

Designated for the promotion and accommodation of all things merry, the dining room at the Seventh Heaven was that much gloomier of a place to be alone. Walls that had been filled with life and laughter not long ago were now the jaws of a gaping void, populated only by empty chairs stacked in upside-down hibernation. The window blinds, cast in stark relief by city lights, sliced the room into strips of gleam and shadow.

Sitting in the middle of this dreary picture was Tifa Lockhart. For the last hour she'd been staked out in the restaurant's rearmost window booth, wringing her hands and watching restlessly for a sign.

The phone rang.

She pounced on it at once. "Barret?"

"Oh…" Hope drained from her voice. "Yes, this is Strife Delivery Service."

Just another order for Cloud: one expedited letter to be delivered in person tomorrow evening, seven o'clock, Wall Market, Northwest side.

She noticed that these directions coincided exactly with the WRO rally Reeve had mentioned earlier.

"Yes... thank you very much… have a nice night."

Tifa hung up the phone, poured herself another bitter cup of coffee, and resumed her post at the window. Every so often her eyes would turn to the sooty emulsion bubbling up over Sector One; the sight of so much smoke made her ill, yet she couldn't bring herself to look away from it. When she saw all her sorrows compounded in the relentless spewing of that black fog – when she counted in its ripples the innumerable questions and hypothetical scenarios regarding Barret's fate and Midgar's future – when she contemplated all these things, she stooped to such despair that for a moment she wished that a certain ex-Soldier could be there to comfort her.

Then she remembered: he can't. He can't even take care of himself.

There was a time when Tifa had thought of Cloud as her knight in shining armor, the man who would rescue her in her darkest hour. She'd even twisted his arm into making a stupid promise about it when they were children. And while the adolescent girl who dreamt up that promise in the wishing well of Nibelheim has long since grown up, in her weaker moments of womanhood Tifa occasionally regresses to this fantasy before catching herself and coming to her senses.

Whether or not Cloud was a hero – whatever that means – was debatable, but there was no question that either way his presence would be of little help in this situation: the last thing Tifa needed now was a mentally eighteen-year-old boy adding his own angst to the weight on her shoulders.

Forget Cloud; she wished Cid were around. He'd waltz in confidently, spit in the corner with panache, and offer some profane words of consolation... maybe even a cigarette to choke her sorrows. Why not? If no one was going see the burden Tifa carried beneath her outward pleasantness, she figured she might as well take up smoking and put some tar under the whiteness of her breasts.

Her ruminations went on like this until the front door swung open and a sharp gale scattered her meticulously piled grievances from conscious thought. Suddenly, her attentions spent brooding were swept up in a current of adrenaline surging toward the shape of a man standing in the open doorway.

Resealing the windy portal behind him, the towering figure stomped into the lattice-shadowed dining room. Some odd slices of his body could be seen in the stray beams of light: a plastic hardhat sat on the cusp of his streamlined head; a white muscle shirt bulged between the lapels of an old flannel jacket; and a battered steel lunchbox swayed in the grip of a hand seemingly wrought from the same material.

It was Barret Wallace.

"Honey, I'm home!" he called out jokingly, flipping on the lights.

Tifa was in no mood to laugh.

"Where the hell have you been?!"

"IHad to work overtime," he answered, ambling behind the bar to grab a beer.

Tifa wrinkled her nose as he walked by.

"You smell like smoke!"

"Yeah, well" – he picked up a warm bottle of ale and levered off the cap with his metal thumb – "there was this explosion at the oil refinery, you know, near the site, and–"

"I know," grumbled Tifa.

"What's wrong?" He flashed her a jaunty grin. "You weren't worried about me were you?

Tifa didn't answer.

"Aw shucks, I'm sorry."

She folded her arms.

"I'm really sorry!"

"You'll have to do better than that…"

Barret threw his hands up in exasperation. "Okay then, I'm taking tomorrow off and spending it with Marlene! How do you like that?"

Tifa smiled coyly. "That'll do."

A few words on Barret Wallace:

Most people first met Barret on the evening news, back when his face was still drawn in pencil and his name was Unidentified Black Male. Muscular build. Approximate height of six and a half feet. Estimated weight of three hundred pounds when fully equipped. Piercing in left ear. Scar on right cheek. Flaming skull tattoo on left shoulder. Gatling gun in place of right hand. Presumed to be armed and dangerous.

Although six men and women had been confirmed as participants in the Avalanche bombings, the media devoted so much coverage to Barret alone one would think he'd blown up those two reactors single-handedly. Perhaps it was because he was the leader of the group. Perhaps it was that he was the easiest to spot, the human tank with a giant skull emblazoned on one arm and a gun for the other. And besides, he's black.

Shinra's ministry of propaganda had hit the jackpot.

But beneath the intimidating exterior and terrorist rap sheet, one finds another side to this man: a loving father and loyal friend whom few are privileged to know. The truth is that the intensity of Barret's actions have come from an intensity of heart. He would sacrifice his soul and life for kindred and comrade, respectively.

Still, just because he'd fight to the death for a brother in arms, that doesn't necessarily guarantee his immediate hospitality when a couple of them show up at his doorstep in the middle of the night without invitation.

"What the hell?" Barret wheeled around at the sound of footsteps entering the diner, finding their origin in three pairs of feet belonging to one pair of fellows.

Tifa greeted them with astonishment: "Red! Vincent!"

"Forgive the intrusion," said Red XIII. "There's been an accident, a massive fire in Sector One. We had to be sure you were safe."

"Yeah, yeah," Barret grumbled, "We're touched by the concern and all, but maybe you could try knockin' next time?"

A hostess by habit, Tifa went to fetch a pair of stools for the visitors before remembering the unique "measurements" of Red XIII, at which point she quickly corrected herself and came back with only one.

Vincent, however, saw no reason to sit down and subject his knees to unnecessary bending. He simply stared at the barstool placed before him as if it were an objet d'art, seemingly oblivious to the baffled young woman waiting attentively for his response. Clearly, he had yet to master the finer points of social niceties.

"Umm... listen, there's something you need to know," Tifa began, slipping away from Vincent. "The fire downtown wasn't an accident."

"What?"

"It was done by some terrorists from Bone Village… that's what they're saying anyway. They blew up another one of Ibsen's refineries, just like in their own country."

"The Ghadma Liberation Front…" Red XIII nodded pensively. "The motive certainly fits: Ibsen hasn't exactly been shy about drilling on what these people consider holy land… not to mention the company's charming way of asserting its presence militarily."

Barret reclined against the bar. "Yeah, some messed up world we live in, eh?"

"Just one of the many reasons why Vincent and I have grown concerned over the direction of current events in Midgar. The campaign of pollution and imperialism being waged by your local oil tycoons constitutes a serious threat to the welfare of this Planet, which is to say nothing of the many competitors presently trying to outdo them!"

"That's why you're here, isn't it?" said Tifa. "You came to the city because you want to do something about it."

"Indeed, your allegations would be correct, Ms. Lockhart."

Barret grumbled skeptically. "And just what did you two have in mind?"

"Well," Red began, "that depends on a number of factors, starting with–"

"We're trying to reassemble Avalanche," Vincent blurted out matter-of-factly.

"You… what?"

"Reassemble, huh?" Barret mulled over the thought and gave it a bitter half-chuckle. "If that explosion tonight means anything, I'd say this town already has itself an Avalanche."

Red's ears jolted up. "You'd compare us to terrorists who bomb the city?"

"You weren't there," muttered Barret, "but you might remember hearing about some of the things Avalanche did before you joined up."

"But no matter how dark its history, Avalanche will always be the force that saved this world from total destruction!" Red retorted. "And we can continue to redeem our name by protecting the Planet, employing newer, more peaceful methods…"

"A peaceful avalanche?" Barret shook his head. "Never heard of such a thing. The Planet doesn't care where you've built your house, the rocks gotta give way when they do!"

Tifa buried her face in her palm. "Please don't start this now..."

"Don't start what now? I'm just sayin' things like it is. Nature ain't gonna be put on hold just because they might inconvenience a few people!"

"Inconvenience a few people? Is that what we're calling it now? We killed them, Barret…"

"You know that was an accident, so why don't you just let it alone already!?"

Red XIII stepped in diplomatically. "Listen, I didn't mean to stir up a sensitive subject–"

"Well you did!" Tifa snapped back.

A stoic grunt crawled out from the pit of Vincent's collar: "Hm. We're sorry."

"No," Tifa sighed, "I'm sorry… I didn't mean to yell."

Poor Tifa: bleary-eyed and strung out on bad coffee, she only wanted to go to sleep and somehow ended up debating environmental policy and social ethics with a vampire and a lion instead.

"Can't we just put all this Avalanche business behind us?" she pleaded. "I know saving the world is a tough act to follow, but we have to accept some things as they are and get on with our lives already!"

Red XIII's disposition remained decidedly cold.

"Our lives will end in a certain number of years," he observed pragmatically. "The Planet, on the other hand, could go eons before its time if we don't take control of this situation now."

"Oh?" Barret perked up sarcastically. "And how the do we do that?"

"It's simple: we rally the people to our cause and educate them in maintaining a sustainable way of life."

"Simple, huh? Why don't you try going out there and lecturing them on sustainable ways of life while they're wondering how they're gonna feed themselves tonight? The only people that might listen to us are on the ones struggling just to get by!"

"It sounds to me that our involvement is needed more than ever," Vincent remarked.

"Our involvement can't do shit! Avalanche might've been able to take down a maniac like Sephiroth, but only a maniac like him could take down Shinra!"

Red XIII responded in his usual lofty manner: "So then, you mean to say that evil is the only effective course of action?"

"Put it this way… you reach out to a soldier offering peace and he shoots you in the face. People sacrifice their lives only to be forgotten. We save the Planet and they resume its destruction as soon as they possibly can. The only things in this world that are good themselves don't do any good! You get my drift?"

"Sounds like you've given it some thought," murmured Vincent.

"And chosen to do nothing as a result," added Red. "I guess that makes you a real philanthropist, by your own philosophy."

Barret grimaced and said nothing.

"Now then, are you two done showing us the outstanding charm you plan on 'rallying the people to your cause' with?" Tifa scowled and set her arms akimbo, addressing Red XIII and Vincent like an angry parent. "This is ridiculous! You come here in the middle of the night without any warning, asking us to drop everything right here and now and join you on some half-baked crusade, and then you have the nerve to rake us over the coals us with some self-righteous sermon when we say, 'no, thank you'? Give me a break!"

Red opened his mouth to say something in defense, but found nothing.

"Forgive me," he said, lowering his head until only the crest of his neck could be seen. "Sometimes in my zeal I forget where proper respect is due. Vincent and I both realize that just by being here in the city both of you have done far more in the last two years than either of us have."

Tifa drew a cleansing breath. "Don't worry about it."

Barret remained silent.

"You know, if you guys are wanting to get involved in local politics, tomorrow night Reeve's organization is holding a rally–"

"The WRO?"

"That's right," Tifa continued, fishing the flyer from her apron. "Tomorrow at seven, everyone's lucky number."

"Then we'll make certain to attend."

Barret rose to his massive feet with a suddenness that caused even Vincent to startle.

"Well, I'm hittin' the hay," he announced unceremoniously, nearly tripping over Red as he galumphed toward the staircase and up to his bedroom.

The door upstairs closed with a click and a clunk, leaving the hostess and her visitors stranded in awkward silence.

"Hm. What was that about?"

"Oh, it's just that Barret isn't a big fan of the WRO. I guess he prefers a more hands-on approach."

"I'm sure Mr. Tuesti kidnapping his daughter hasn't had any small influence on his opinion of the organization either."

"It's complicated," groaned Tifa. "Can't we just leave it at that?"

"Hm. Fair enough."

"Look, the important thing is that if you ask him about it privately, I'm sure Reeve will be more than happy to figure out a way to work with the two of you."

Red nodded. "Thank you, Tifa. We'll do that."

"Great. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to try and get a couple hours of sleep before tomorrow."

"Ah, yes… which reminds me…"

"Huh?"

"Would it be all right if we borrowed Cloud's room for the night?"

"And what makes you so sure he isn't already using it?" Tifa asked coyly.

"Well, that is, given the assumption that he isn't home, of course." Red's tail lowered bashfully. "Which is to say, erm–"

"So, you tried him before you tried us, huh? Was it hard finding his secret hideout?"

"I was going to tell you," Red XIII mumbled apologetically. "I just thought you'd had enough 'sensitive subjects' brought up for one night."

"You don't have to tell me anything," said Tifa, her gaze trailing off to some distant melancholy. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out whose place he prefers."

And with that, she bid them good night.


	9. Plans Within Plans

"This is ridiculous! Outrageous!"

"_Something the matter, Mr. Brennt?"_

"This is the second refinery you've bombed in the last five months, that's what's the matter!"

The wheelchair-bound man casually riffled through some documents on his desk, neglecting to look at the shouting face onscreen. "_Mm, yes… must've been those terrorists from Bone Village. You know, the ones whose homeland your company invaded for those precious fossil fuels you love so much?"_

"Don't play games with me!"

"_Fine then, you want the truth? Not much you can do with that. Can't fix a leak with the truth, can't cure pinkeye with it… and I certainly wouldn't recommend using it to justify occupying neutral territory, heavens no! You want my advice? Stick with the Bone Village thing. Foreigners blowing stuff up? The public gulps it down and asks for seconds."_

By now the reader should recognize our friend the man in white. The short-tempered character speaking with him via teleconference is none other than Karl Brennt, CSO of the Ibsen Oil Company.

A man of humble beginnings, Karl William Brennt III likes to think of his currently lucrative position as the apex of a long and fruitful career. _Excelsior _has been his lifelong motto and he's followed it without compromise, allowing no distinction between acquiring the last desire and desiring the next acquisition. It was this dual engine of avarice that ultimately propelled him to executive power, the insatiable hunger that saw him never content with his spoils but always wagering them on greater prospects. He experienced everything in anticipation and never in passing, as one reads a sign while speeding down the highway. Where some might have seen life as a stroll through the park, Brennt saw an eight-lane commute.

But before he could embark on his first commercial speculations, good old Karl had to start by paying dues, just like the rest of us. In his case it was a pedagogical gig: after his family's business when up in flames with Corel, he traveled to Gongaga and became headmaster of the village's newly established school for boys. He didn't have a doctorate in education as he had claimed, but he owned a tweed jacket and calabash pipe to make up for it, and by God, he was going to box those little roughneck bastards on the ears until they went deaf if that's what it took to get them saying "is not" instead of "ain't." Especially that one little punk, the one with the cocky grin...

It was around this time that Mr. Brennt came to the realizing that he hated children and gave up teaching to become a billionaire.

By shares of coincidence and causation, much of Mr. Brennt's inner-character and history extends to the features of his outward appearance. His hot temper, for instance, issues from a head bristling with flaming red hair. Feathered muttonchops spread like fire down his cheeks and converge in a handlebar mustache (Brennt has always prided his whiskers as a badge of manhood, counting among his most prized possessions a razor and strop inherited from his late uncle Chester).

Beneath the flaunted wealth of whiskers, however, the flesh and bone of this man are corrupt and infirm: childhood rickets has left him hobbling on a bamboo cane; he has liver spots on his arms and legs; and his blood pressure couldn't be any higher if his heart were a vacuum pump. His bulbous nose is lumpy and ruddy as a strawberry, and dotted likewise with seedy little blackheads.

For the bulk of his ailments and afflictions, Brennt has no one to blame but himself. He's made a routine of drinking two mint juleps a day and smoking from his pipe just as often, once at noon and once at midnight. By some bizarre compulsion, he has always lit his tobacco by striking a match across his dentures – a habit that has left his crooked smile skid-marked and his mouth reeking of sulfur. He eats butter and brie sandwiches between meals, takes his toast with foie gras and his coffee with more than a little brandy. Indeed, he is in every way the self-made man he boasts to be. And though he has since resigned to the inevitable day when his vice-riddled body will be his undoing, until then Karl Brennt accepts no defeat. He is pathologically determined to be the author of his own demise, the master of his own destiny – And if some blanket-faced cripple or anyone else ever thought they could deal behind his back… well, they were about to find out otherwise!

"Listen to me!" he barked. "People are going to get suspicious if we don't slow down!"

_"Right…"_ The man in white made wagged his finger into the camera. "_Here's a tip for you beginners in politics: people don't get suspicious, they're too busy thinking about themselves."_

"But, but…" Brennt sputtered for a retort. "But these weren't the terms we agreed on!"

"_What difference does it make to you? You'll still get to be my next CEO when all is said and done, I promise you that."_

"But how the hell am I supposed to coordinate all of this when we aren't even on the same goddamned timetable? I don't even know what's going on anymore!"

Yellow teeth gnashed between black lips._ "Frankly, Mr. Brennt, I could have just as easily bombed those refineries without your 'coordination'. Let's not forget who the mastermind is here."_

"Don't get cheeky with me, you cotton-swaddled prick! We gotta stick by the plan!"

"_Come now, surely I get to have a little wiggle room?"_

"You take out nearly half of Ibsen's refineries in a few months when we agreed to do it over three years, and you call that 'wiggle room?'"

"_You still don't get it, do you?" _The man in white pulled back his sleeve and gestured potently with the decaying arm underneath._ "I don't have years_!"

And then, on the other side of the world, Karl Brennt doubled over in agony and clutched his chest as if he were having a heart attack.

"_Honestly, I don't know why I bother. It's so much easier doing it this way."_

Brennt reached for the panic button on his desk, but his limbs were quickly paralyzed. He opened his mouth to cry for help, but only strangled croaks came out.

"What… the… "

"_The cells of Jenova: odorless, tasteless – completely undetectable to the senses when applied in trace amounts. They're also quite resilient – more than capable of surviving in a decanter of brandy for a few days."_

Brennt gazed in horror at the empty glass on his desk.

"_These happen to be a very rare and unique breed. You should consider it an honor."_

"Son of a–"

"_Language!" _The man in white raised his arm and gestured a second time, silencing Brennt with further pain.

"_Hurts, doesn't it? Although it goes against the cells' interests to attack their own host, just like the rest of you lower life forms I can easily manipulate them toward my own ends."_

He shifted in his wheelchair and coughed.

"_Ahem. Let's get to the point shall we? For the next forty-eight hours, I will be able to direct your thoughts, actions, speech, and bodily functions toward whatever ends I see fit. Make any effort to resist and you will die – do I make myself clear?"_

Brennt managed a nod.

"_Good. Tomorrow I want you to run a little errand for me downtown. Think you can handle that?"_


	10. Waking Dialogue

The following conversation takes place in total nothingness. No color, no shape, no weight, no smell, no feeling – not an up or a down about it.

There are only voices, two identical voices echoing back and forth in the dark.

"Hello," says the first.

_"Who are you?"_ asks the second.

"That depends on who you are," the first says to the second.

"I'm not really sure who I am."

"Have you ever thought of going back home? You know, retracing your roots..."

"Home?"

"Nibelheim, where your family is waiting."

"The only family I ever had was my mother."

"Yes, that's right."

"But… she died."

"No, no. Your mother can't die."

"I don't understand."

"Come home and you will."

"Why?!" Cloud screamed, flailing in cold sweat.

The dream was over before he could ask, much less get an answer.

He sat up and shook his head, jarring his brain back into the reality. It was then that he realized most the "sweat" chilling him was actually dew.

He'd fallen asleep in the flowers again. It was the same spot where he'd woken from a similar dream two years ago, to discover that a girl named Aeris Gainsborough had entered his life.

He woke now to rediscover that she was dead, as he had done every other day for the past two years.

.

.

.

Tifa rose to the sound of a shrieking smoke alarm. With reflexes that would have made even her sensei shake his head in disbelief, she flipped out of bed, thrust her naked legs into a pair of jeans, and had already exited the bedroom before her feet could even touch the floor.

Terrible scenarios played through her head. Was the house burning? Had the terrorists from the North attacked their neighborhood?

Not quite.

She followed the smoke into the kitchen and found Barret, Red XIII, and Vincent crowded around a blazing pan of what had once been eggs and bacon.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"Makin' us some breakfast!" Barret shouted over the smoke alarm.

She pushed him aside and grabbed the pan. "Breakfast? You've practically made yourselves some napalm! Go turn off the alarm and open some windows!"

"What about the eggs?"

"I'll cook your damned eggs! Now move it!"

Soon following this the flames were quelled, the air was cleared, and Barret, Tifa, Marlene, Vincent and Red were seated to an impressive spread. By assuming helm of the stove, Tifa had unwittingly set herself up to cook for the boys, each of them wanting something different: salted potatoes and black bread for Vincent; yerba mate tea and two whole salmon filets for Red; eggs and grits for Barret…

They all thanked her tersely between bites.

"No problem," Tifa exhaled, sitting down to a light repast of coffee and cold leftover pizza.

Meanwhile, Marlene was pouring herself a bowl of Cocoa-b'os when something round and shiny fell from the specially marked box.

She held up her prize triumphantly. "Look Papa, what I got!"

"Is that a marble?"

"Yeah!"

"Huh. You can't play marbles with just one of 'em. I wonder what we should do about that?"

Marlene shrugged bashfully. "I don't know…"

"Maybe we could go to the toy store and get you a full set?"

"Can we?!" She threw down her spoon and glomped onto her Papa's knee. "Canwecanwecanwecanewe?"

"Yup!" he rumbled merrily, beaming like a big black Santa. "Today's our special day!"

Between Marlene's giddy squeals and Barret's raucous mirth, Red XIII's ever-vigilant ears picked up the faint sound of knocking.

"Someone's out front," he growled.

Barret didn't seem to take notice. Vincent was busy looking at… something.

"I'll get it," Tifa groaned.

She made her way to the front of the house just in time to catch a glimpse of a red-haired man hobbling across the street on a bamboo cane. He'd dropped something through the mail slot, a single envelope addressed to "Strife Delivery Service."

She pushed it aside with her toe and went back to the kitchen.

"Who's that?" Barret asked.

"Just another letter for Cloud."

"That spiky-headed fool doesn't pay you enough to manage his business."

"And you don't pay me anything to manage your breakfast. What's your point?"

Barret ceded with a shrug.

"So then," continued Tifa, turning to Red and Vincent, "any plans this afternoon?"

They shook their heads like reluctantly.

"Good. Some local kids are coming here at ten to work the lunch shift. The two with the long hair and the acne – Yoj and Kazoo are their names – could you tell them to fill in for me?"

"Ah, of course," said Red XIII. "But who's going to fill in for them?"

Tifa's smile sharpened. "You two can wash dishes, right?"

.

.

.

Cloud groaned and rubbed the crust from his mako-blue eyes.

Waking for Cloud was an unusual ritual these days, largely due to his diminished sense of time. When a man leads a life of monotony and solitude, it follows that all parts of the day and all days of the week should eventually congeal into one indistinct blob. The only thing that lent any sort of shape to the hours in Cloud's life was his part-time racket as a delivery boy, and that was the only good thing about the job.

He rolled over in his sleeping bag as something funny played through his mind. A week ago, a hobo in Sector Three had been playing a two-stringed ukulele and singing:

_I don't care anymore,  
Even me balls don't care.  
When I wake up I go back to sleep,  
Cuz I don't care no more. _

Strange that it occur to him now, having passed by the starving artist and his song without taking notice of either at the time.

_When I wake up I go back to sleep,  
Cuz I don't care no more._

Cloud rolled over in his sleeping bag yet again. Something in his pocket pressed uncomfortably under his thigh…

The Bawaajige Nagwaagan: in addition to signifying one's scholarship at Cosmo Canyon, the circular weave was said to snare bad dreams before they entered the mind.

_Yeah right_, he thought, chucking the thing aside and lying back down.

The talisman whistled through the air and hit the floor with a faint thwack. Then a creak. Then groan.

The doors were opening.

Cloud scrambled to his feet and turned to face the intruder head-on. By now he was somewhat used to dealing with competing squatters and even the occasional city official looking to encroach on his hermitage.

He hoped this one fell into the former category; the vagrants were always easier to bribe.

"Cloud?"

He couldn't believe it.

_After all this time… _

"Tifa?"

"Surprise..."

"What are you doing here?"

"Packages," she explained breezily, dropping a bulky sack on the floor. "One of them is for the WRO rally tonight, so I guess you'll be attending whether you like it or not."

"Oh."

"So, yeah… Red and Vincent are going to be there too… did you know that they're visiting? I hope you don't mind if they stay in your--"

"How'd you find me?"

Tifa's simper vanished.

"Come on Cloud, I'm no fool."

"Well you never came before."

"And I don't know what I'm doing here now."

"Bringing those packages…" Cloud murmured pathetically.

"Yeah," Tifa sighed, "right…"

She paced around the church some, measuring the silence with loud, purposeful steps.

"So this is how you live," she said at last.

"Surprise…"

"Please, Cloud, I'm begging you! I don't care where you go, just leave this place!"

"Why should I…"

"For your own sanity! It's killing you, the way you cling to these old memories…"

"Old memories?" He shook his head. "Things as they are now, that's what's old. This city and its problems, you and your lectures – I've heard it all before."

"Oh yeah?" Tifa snarled back. "Well here's something you haven't heard before… I'm sick of caring about you! You think you're the only one who's had a hard time? This is Midgar! People are digging through the trash for food! Maybe if you weren't always feeling sorry yourself you'd notice!"

"I'm sorry. "

"I don't know why I bother… all you do is hurt the people who try to get close to you!"

"Maybe that's why I stay away," Cloud muttered.

"Oh yeah, real poetic." Tifa's voice trembled into dark territory. "You and I both know why you're here…"

"Don't–"

"You really think she'd have wanted it this way?"

Cloud looked at the floor with a grim face and exhaled loudly.

"No," he said. "I think she would have rather lived."

Tifa just stood and stared. There was something about the way he said it – a hint of resentment, an oblique look of spite – something about the way he said it _to her_.

The patina had been scraped from her eyes now; for the perhaps the first time in her life, she saw the man before her with painful clarity.

This was him. This bitter, sullen man was Cloud.

And she couldn't stand to be in his presence a moment longer.

Without another word, Tifa regarded him with a feeble nod and carried herself out the door on numb, automated feet. She felt hollow and nauseous. Her throat constricted and nearly pulled her into tears. She wouldn't allow it. She was a woman of endurance, a slayer of monsters and a mother to grown men. Tears didn't suit her.

Meanwhile, Cloud observed this turbulent departure with the dull perplexity of a startled animal. Already aloof by disposition, withdrawal from society had left the young man tactless as a cactuar; he couldn't understand what had made Tifa so upset. Why did she run out like that? He didn't say anything offensive. He'd done nothing wrong…

He fell to his knees and punched the floor uselessly. To hell with her. Was his pain too inconvenient? What a selfish and shallow-- and the way she'd called Aeris an "old memory!"

He beat the floor harder still, his anger doubling with each blow. Eventually, something gave way with a sharp crack, and his fists struck dampness. Cloud came back to his senses then, astonished as he blinked the rage from his eyes and saw what his stupid tantrum had accomplished: he'd punched straight through the floorboards and into cold earth below.

As with Aeris' flowerbed, here too, the soil was fertile. Only something else had been growing here, a different kind of flower. Without any sunlight, they shouldn't have been able to grow at all, much less bloom. Yet somehow there they were, having managed just fine. Even the blossoms crushed under the recently collapsed flooring looked as if they still might recover.

Cloud looked at them and felt an undefined and overwhelming sense of remorse.

Botanists call them Myosotis.

Everyone else calls them Forget-me-nots.


	11. Bloody Pulpit

Cloud was fifteen minutes ahead of schedule as he peddled on to the next stop fin his itinerary. Though he wasn't yet close enough to see where he was going, riding upwind gave it away immediately: the paint fumes, the tempura fried pork rinds, the Spanish fly incense and pot smoke, pineapple-flavored cigarettes and stale urine and turpentine… the coagulated blood of stray dogs being turned into "beef" for the diner's daily special…

Welcome to Wall Market.

Named for its proximity to the massive partition separating the vertex of Sector Six from Midgar's central pillar, the emporium known as Wall Market is a veritable pile of manure from which vices spring up like mushrooms: dope dealers, prostitutes, pickpockets, cockfights... The air is dirty, the ground is dirty, the people are dirty… even the yellowish light given off by the electric torches feels dirty (being surrounded by all that squalor may have given them jaundice). Vices make up three quarters of the economy and stink up the other quarter with tequila puke and meth lab fumes. A sprinkler system loaded with green paint regularly sprays the dirt around all the shops, "because green look like grass to make customer happy for keep coming back," according to the guy with wooden teeth who works the local chowder bar on Fridays. Ironic that the resulting buildup of toxic pigments in the earth will make Wall Market the last place to see grass in the event that plant life returns to Midgar soil – something the local shopkeepers aren't betting their livelihood on any time soon.

As for the shops themselves, Wall Market offers your usual tenderloin fare, with local favorites such as "Gun Party," "Sex-4-Less," and "Saint Phillip Anthony's Bingo Barn." The typical business is run from shack or pavilion built according to shantytown standards: corrugated tin sheets, shreds of aramid fiber canvas, and PVC pipes coupled with duct tape comprise the chief construction materials. Even if some of the more upscale establishments observe the odd building code here and there, all in all the market comes off like a succession of chimeras; the only semblance of consistency in this teetering hodgepodge is the ground it's built on.

Perverts and entomology fetishists will be happy to know that The Honey Bee Inn is still around… sort of. Operating under the joint ownership of local bodybuilders Mukki and Big Bro, the famed brothel and massage parlor now goes by "The Queen Bee."

Their slogan: "Where the girls have a sting."

On a related note, Wall Market's other big landmark, Don Corneo's mansion, has also seen some changes. And by "some changes," I mean into a housing project. A couple of amateur urban mythologists were recently arrested by the Department of Public Safety Services for breaking into the tenement and demolishing one of the walls in the boiler room – nearly rupturing a gas main and killing themselves in the process – all because they so sincerely believed that this partition had been concealing the fabled fetish dungeon of the don, which is said to contain everything from gold to dead bodies to materia orbs containing spells for male enhancement, depending on whom you ask. Others still insist that a certain wealthy collector of curios various (let us call him "D.O.") has already purchased the last of the few valuables found hidden in the dead don's estate.

But let us return present matters: it was here in the back alley of this notorious tenement (the northeast corner of the building parameter, to be exact) that Cloud the delivery boy was supposed to fulfill his contract by putting a letter in the hands of a Mr. "W.C. Mann." Arriving ten minutes early, Cloud drew up on his bike, set it behind a dumpster, and decided to pass the time doing what he did best: brooding.

Though the building blocked his view, he could hear a crowd starting to accumulate by the wall – Reeve's audience, presumably. He leaned back and mused cynically:

_Why'd he choose to have his rally is this toilet?_

.

.

Engineered to support a slice of the upper plate that never was, the wall of Wall Market once designated the only spot in the city affording the slums a rare glimpse of daylight. Perhaps, then, to the activists and WRO supporters now gathered beneath it, the wall was meant to recall a sense of hope, a shiny golden ray shot through the pall of oppression, a stoma in the belly of the beast. Others might have noticed the graffiti scrawled across the wall's surface and thought of it as a billboard of the people, a tablet set in stone depicting words and images in fluid motion, a canvas of ideas and symbols in a constant state of deconstruction and renewal. More cynical individuals yet might have focused on the stage erected at the foot this concrete monolith and seen the whole thing as nothing more than a cheap photo-op for a wannabe rabble-rouser trying to forge some sort of contrived solidarity with the lower class.

In any case, with the wall standing over one hundred meters, a public speaker couldn't hope for a more spectacular backdrop.

Tifa was the first Avalanche alumnus to arrive. Filing through the multitude of people in attendance, she estimated no less than ninety-percent of the WRO and its supporters to be skinny vegans riding bicycles and wearing backpacks.

Cloud could easily pass for one of them, she thought.

_Cloud…_

The name recalled their unhappy exchange earlier in the day. She tried focusing on not thinking about it, which of course proved entirely paradoxical.

_Damn._

"Tifa."

She turned on her heel and found Red and Vincent standing behind her.

"Hey, you made it! How was work?"

Vincent answered with a long and intricately composed grunt.

"A little difficult," Red XIII translated.

Tifa chuckled. "Consider your bed and breakfast paid for."

"Hmm, yes…" Red's voice trailed off as his attentions drifted out into the bustling crowd.

With his one roving eye he conducted a flash knee-level survey of the bipedal multitude. Most of them were teenagers and adolescent twenty-somethings (there may have been a jolly bearded man with glasses somewhere in there as well). These people sat in circles on the ground, talked and laughed amongst themselves, smiling and nodding lazily. A few were strumming tonelessly on beat up guitars; others pounded on what looked like poor imitations of his tribe's sacred drums…

He sniffed the air picked up the scent of burning herbs. "Hmm. Reeve' certainly attracts a novel constituency…"

"Says the giant talking housecat," Tifa replied teasingly.

This and a hundred more conversations were suddenly interrupted as the tortured squeal of manhandled sound equipment razed the crowd's eardrums.

"TEST…TEST…OKAY, RIGHT ON."

The screeching feedback had come from a not-so-skinny backpack-wearing vegan kid who in his enthusiasm had decided to clumsily mount the stage and begin talking (i.e. shouting) into the microphone mid-sentence:

"…SO THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE INTERESTED IN MAKING DONATIONS, PLEASE SPEAK TO ME OR GERRY… GERRY, WHERE ARE YOU?"

A hand rose from the crowd, accompanied by one or two more exclamations of "woo!"

"RIGHT THEN, SPEAK WITH ME OR HIM AFTER THE PROGRAM. THERE WILL ALSO BE TIME THEN FOR QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS… AND, UH… RIGHT, AND WE ALSO HAVE SOME LITERATURE AVAILABLE AT THESE TABLES UP FRONT HERE, YOU SHOULD REALLY CHECK IT OUT–"

Much to everyone's relief, another WRO organizer stepped in and politely took the microphone from her enthusiastic but clearly misdirected peer.

"Uh, well then… that being said, I think we can begin now," she announced in a soft, placating voice. "Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honor to introduce to you a truly great man, a bold thinker and a passionate advocate of social justice and responsible environmental policy – please welcome our founder and leader… Mr. Reeve Tuesti!"

The crowd crackled with applause as Reeve strode in and took his place at the pulpit. With his goatee tinseled in the spotlight and statuesque hands clutching the podium as if it were the world's helm, at that moment the humble activist leader looked grand enough to pass for the emperor of Wutai, even as he smiled meekly and braced himself against the roaring ovation with humble gestures.

"Thank you for the lovely introduction Candice… and thank all of you for coming out tonight. I appreciate everyone being here, especially in wake of the disturbing incident last night in Sector One. I think we're all still very much shaken up by it…"

He dipped his head and assumed a more solemn tone.

"Although I'm happy to report that there have been no fatalities from this incident, I still offer my sincerest condolences to the injured refinery workers and their families, and to anyone else who might have suffered from this crime. Now, we've all been told countless times that the cause of the explosion was a group of terrorists from the North, that the chain of causality begins and ends with them -- a compelling narrative, to be sure. For centuries we've been raised to associate the North with danger, mysticism, barbarism, and superstition. It is home to the occult and the unknown; to the Cetra, the Weapons, the Crater, Jenova… and now these terrorists from the so-called Bone Village.

"And why do we call it that? The term was coined over a hundred and fifty years ago by explorers serving imperialist ideology. To call the land 'Bone Village' would suggest that everything there is already dead, that it exists only to be dug up, and that no one's lives will be disrupted in the process. Well, we're living in a new century now and it's about time our vocabulary reflected it. These people and their land have a real name: they are the nation of Ghadma. How telling that the media has only started using the term recently… as a synonym for the Ghadma Liberation Front.

"So let's start using the term in its proper historical context. Who are the Ghadma really? Who were they before they replaced Wutai as our propagandists' favorite foreign bogeyman?

"To make peace with the Ghadma, we first need to understand a few basic things about them, without pejorative topical associations or xenophobic distortion. First off, one should know that they are a deeply religious people. They practice a rich and ancient culture that is shrinking every day with the pressure to assimilate to our modern global-economic paradigm. They claim spiritual kinship with the Cetra, which, as many of you know, made their capital in the reef valley just a little ways north. And like the Cetra, the Ghadma harbor a deep respect for this Planet. They also harbor a deep distrust of outsiders – thanks largely in part to the archaeological community, which after a hundred and fifty years of excavating hallowed grounds and disturbing ancestral remains, has only now begun to make an effort to advance its studies with deference and respect for the wishes of local tribes. So in light of all this, it should come as no surprise that Ibsen's drilling projects are wholly unwelcome in this part of the world, corrupt officials notwithstanding. When we start drilling on another people's land with total disregard for everything they hold sacred – when Ibsen imposes its commercial expansion by employing mercenaries who commit all sorts of human rights violations – when our city's largest structure is a giant gun pointing north (which we supposedly keep around as a 'historic monument') – why should we be so shocked to learn that these people fear and hate us? If we're going talk about the cause of last night's explosion, we need to talk about what caused the formation of militant groups like the Ghadma Liberation Front in the first place!

The crowd cheered.

"I'm here to tell you now that the source of our problems doesn't come from some foreign menace or distant land... we created all our problems right here in at home with our failure move on from the past… our failure to turn the page on outdated notions of industry and properly address our energy crisis. With Ibsen currently entangled in illegal military operations overseas, and with Shinra now attempting to take back the market with a new form of Mako in accordance with our insufficient environmental-protection laws, the road to the future is once more divided, and many paths look frighteningly familiar. Friends, citizens, we are now faced with a monumental decision... where we proceed from here may very well determine the fate of our planet.

"And yet this decision is being left to the judgment of a handful of men, a committee composed of a few unscrupulous, small-minded public officials who represent nobody's interests apart from one of two feuding corporate giants. Ibsen or Shinra: that's the only choice we're told exists, a choice between two companies that, for all their talk of fuel economy and responsibility to the environment, have yet to put forth an energy proposal that is even remotely sustainable in the ecological sense of the word."

He paused to turn the pages of some notes on the lectern in front of him.

"Let us first consider the oil industry, a so-called lesser of two evils..."

Warming up to the stage now, Reeve proceeded to outline his case passionately and precisely: he explained the threat of global warming with all its causes and effects, citing the research of Cosmo Canyon's scholars, the Great Glacier melting, and other things; he explained how last night's terrorist attack was just the beginning of what would happen for long as Ibsen encroached on the Ghadma and other oppressed nations; he explained Shinra's bid to take back Midgar with Mako2, and how producing a cleaner burning fuel doesn't really matter if production comes at the expense of the Planet's vital reserves. As he explained all these things he remained constantly animated throughout, marking succinct points with a sharply cocked finger and kneading the air when grappling with convoluted subjects. He never missed a beat as he conducted the audience like an orchestra, summoning crescendos of cheers one moment and pregnant lulls the next. His command over the crowd's attention was so great that those in attendance seldom looked away for even a second.

Looking back on it, the night might gone better if Reeve's oratory skills were a bit more lacking. If his delivery had been a little off, for example, his speech would have been less engaging; and if his speech had been a little less engaging, more attentions would have wandered; and if more attentions had wandered, maybe then someone would have spotted the brief flicker of a shadowy form slipping across a nearby rooftop.

But as fate would have it, Reeve had practiced his speech dozens of times in front of a mirror daily, and so no one saw the man in the black ski mask as he skirted by and vanished to the other side of the roof where he found a sniper rifle waiting for him.

.

.

Cloud heard another round of applause echo from the other side of the tenement.

_Sounds like Reeve's thing is going well_, he thought.

If only the same could be said of his own task. After waiting what had to be at least twenty minutes without so much as an indication of this Mr. Mann character, Cloud had long since used up his patience and was beginning to grow irritable.

_Waiting… waiting, waiting…_

He heaved a sigh of boredom and, for lack of a wristwatch, glanced absentmindedly at the envelope in his hand.

It was then that he noticed the address of the sender.

_Shinra Manor…_

Suddenly Cloud was struck with a distinct and unbearable sensation – something at once alien and familiar. A deafening tone rang through his skull and hot blood thudded in his ears. Doubling over and falling to his knees, he gripped his throbbing head, the letter still between his fingers. When the lip of the envelope kissed his scalp a fever ignited in his brain: he could feel it speak to him the wordless language of hormones and neurotransmitters, urging him to tear the letter open – an urge more absolute than the need to breath or blink. His senses became sharpened beyond sanity, tuned to perceive only the letter in his hand: he could smell the saliva where the seal had been licked; he could feel the weight where fingertips had pressed it shut. Looking at the envelope it even seemed as if he could almost make out its inner contents in his mind's eye.

Almost. Cloud finally succumbed to the fatal itch and ravenously tore into the letter's seal. Satisfied thus in its purpose, the brain fever vanished from his mind as quickly as darkness recedes from a drawn shade, leaving him then in the sober light of his discovery.

In the envelope was a photograph that by all accounts should have perished seven years ago…

Attached to it, a note of five words:

_Look up at the roof._

.

.

"It falls to us, the ordinary citizens, to do something about it," Reeve bellowed into the microphone. "Contrary to what the corporate propaganda machine wants us to think, we still have a say in what happens to _our_ planet. Now, we can either cede it wholesale to the first power-hungry institutions that cross our path, or we can actually get up off our lazy tuckuses and claim our rightful stake in this world!"

The crowd broke into a raucous series of cheers:

"Power to the people!"

"Sí se puede!"

Reeve stroked is beard with an air of self-satisfaction before somewhat reluctantly restoring composure.

"Thank you… thank you… and while we're on the subject of empowering the people, I'd like to point out that while Mako and oil are capital-based ventures, solar and wind power are labor-based ventures…"

.

Cloud ascended the brick edifice haphazardly, clawing his way up the rattletrap fire escape with aimless grasps, a million thoughts ricocheting through his mind.

_If only there was some way I could warn them.._.

There wasn't. He could have shouted, but he was too far away to be heard by the people that mattered, and he didn't have time to work his way through a crowd. Moreover, any alarm he caused would only benefit the sniper.

His one chance was to catch him off guard before he took his shot.

_If only I had a weapon, or some materia… _

Again, no such luck: eager to put the days of battle behind him, Cloud had long since sold all but one of his blades into Dio's private collection for a quick gil. The buster sword, which he kept out of respect for the one who gave it to him, was currently stowed away in a closet at the Seventh Heaven, wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine since the day of Meteor's destruction. As for materia, every single orb picked up in the journeys of Avalanche had been officially signed over to Yuffie, and with the cessation of Mako production the stuff wasn't exactly easy to come by anymore.

Cloud tightened his grip on the rusted iron rungs.

His fists would have to do.

.

.

"But to Shinra's credit I am told that their new building does in fact include recycling bins in the conference rooms."

The audience tittered with polite laughter.

.

.

A steady pair of crosshairs centered on Reeve's head.

The shot was wide open.

The assassin hooked his finger around the trigger…

**Bam!**

That was the sound of Cloud blindsiding the sniper with all his weight.

Unfortunately, it was also the sound off the rifle going off on contact.

Though Cloud didn't realize it in the heat of the moment, it was at that very moment that everything would change. At a moment a line was drawn, running from the sniper's barrel through Reeve's yielding flesh, through the personal and the political, stitching the ghosts of Cloud's past to the future of the Planet…

At that moment it all came together.

And then the moment passed. Screams erupted from the crowd. Reeve collapsed in a bleeding heap. Cloud and the tackled assassin hit the roof with a tongue-biting thud.

Chaffing against pitch and gravel, defacing frescoes of pigeon feces and glancing rusted blades of rotating chimney cowls, the two men shuffled and tumbled madly in the contest for leverage. Cloud was the first to regain balance; he played the advantage at once and delivered a savage kick to his opponent's jaw. The sniper fell; Cloud lifted him up against the roof access shed and tore the ski mask from his face.

He had the face of an old man, yet the lack of white in his fiery red curls and whiskers suggested that his was a visage aged by vices rather than years.

"Who are you?" Cloud pulled the photograph from the letter out of his pocket. "Who are you and where did you get this?"

The assassin tried to speak; instead he only managed to sputter blood and cough up chunks of shattered denture onto the Mylar faces of Sephiroth, Zack, and Tifa.

"I'll repeat myself once…" Cloud leaned in with a snarl, Mako blue eyes flashing their phosphorescent tapetum. "Tell me your name and where you got the picture!"

"Lissun," the assassin gargled, struggling to clear his throat and manipulate his battered jaw. "Hill kyll ne… hill kyll'es ell…"

"Who?"

He opened his mouth to answer, but his breath was docked and his voice strangled.

"R… rffff…"

"Reeve? You're doing this because you're afraid of _him?"_

The assassin's throat drew tighter. His face became red and swollen as a beet balloon. Eyes bloomed from their sockets; blood trickled from nose and nostril. Skin festered with boils; tumors rippled forth like microwave popcorn. The man's entire body had begun to inflate rapidly.

"Oh hell..."

Cloud dropped everything and dove for cover as a ball of flame exploded from sniper's anatomy and engulfed the whole rooftop.

However, much like the proverbial candle which burns twice as bright, the corporal flame vanished almost instantaneously, taking a good part of its fuel source with it. Save for a pinch of ash and a few bits of viscera here and there, the sniper's torso was almost entirely gone. Everything else – head, limbs, etc –remained perfectly arranged and intact.

Such is the nature of spontaneous combustion: nothing about it makes sense.

When the smoke cleared and he finally opened his eyes, the first thing Cloud saw was Tifa Seven years ago, her adolescent smile sizzling and melting over flaming bits of bone.

"Cloud!" she cried out.

He turned around and saw her now, followed by Red XIII, Vincent, and a couple of concerned activist kids wearing backpacks.

"I couldn't stop him," Cloud mumbled, still in shock. "He just started… burning…"

There was a brief silence. Red XIII came forward.

"Reeve's been shot."

"… what?" Cloud managed hoarsely.

_Who do you think you are? You_ _can't save anyone…_

"W-will he be all right?"

Tifa shook her head dazedly. "I saw him, sort of, with all the… all the commotion… so much blood… Reeve…"

"We don't know," explained Red.

At that moment one of the young activists stepped in to get a better look at the smoldering corpse behind Cloud.

"Holy crap! That's Karl Brennt!"

"Who?"

"He's a… I mean… he _was_ a corporate executive from Ibsen…"

"Ibsen?!"

Cloud felt dizzy. How the hell could something like this happen? He'd been living in total seclusion, completely removed from society… and yet, somehow, his most personal memories were now at the center of the world's largest political conflict.

It was then that he began to realize the truth: escape had never been a possibility. He was connected to something larger than himself, something that he could never understand; and no set walls, no amount introversion could ever hide him from it, because…

"This is Public Safety Services! Nobody Move!"

Cloud's reflections were suddenly interrupted as he and everyone else on the roof were surrounded by a blockade of armed and armored men in uniform.

"That didn't take long," he grumbled.

Actually, the PSS had been present the whole time, carefully monitoring the WRO rally to make sure that all demonstrations remained orderly and observed the rules of peaceful assembly. Why they had failed to notice the sniper was anyone's guess, but a quick glance at the officers' accoutrement suggested that they came looking for riot rather than an assassin: they wore clear plastic shields over their faces and carried larger ones at their sides; they were armed with clubs, tasers, tear gas grenades, and various other "non-lethal" weapons. As for their dress, Cloud was quick to observe that with the help of a tailor and some blue dye, the khaki uniforms beneath their Kevlar padding could have easily passed for the old standard-issue SOLDIER garb.

Maybe they were recycled from it.

At this point, the more idealistic of the two activists present clearly forgot that he stood in the middle of what appeared to be the scene of a murder and began to shout, "Pigs! Pigs!"

Three of them returned the greeting with their truncheons and a pair of handcuffs.

"Take it easy boys, he's got rights," one of the men drawled lazily. "Which reminds me…" He turned to the Cloud and the others. "All of you have the right to remain silent. Anything you can and do will be courted against you… er, will be said against you under the court of law and order… I mean… ah forget it, you know the drill." He impatiently pried off his helmet to reveal a pinched face flanked by long red locks and two dashes of the same color tattooed across his hollow cheeks.

"Reno?"

He unclipped an electro-magnetic rod from his belt and pointed the deactivated weapon at Cloud's chest. "That's Commissioner Reno to you, pal! All of you are under arrest for suspect of murder!"

"What?"

"You heard me! Come along quietly and there won't be any trouble, capeesh?"

No one said a word.

Vincent gave an irritated grunt.


	12. Interlude

Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle

Interlude

* * *

.

"Hello, I'm Arnold Palmer, president of the Shinra Electric Power Company, and I'm here today on the beautiful shores of Costa del Sol to talk to you about something that affects every one of us: the environment. We at Shinra Inc. understand how important it is to exercise responsible stewardship of this Planet, which is why I'm asking you, the citizens of Midgar, to support our new product, Mako 2.

"Mako 2 provides all the advantages of Mako technology while producing ninety-percent less emissions. In fact, our new and improved methods have turned Mako into the world's cleanest and safest energy source – not only for you and your family, but for all of the Planet's creatures. Just ask my friend here, who's gotten a real lousy deal from a recent oil spill…"

"PROPS!"

Right on cue, an unseen hand dropped a flapping baby sea turtle into Palmer's sweaty digits.

"Don't worry little fella, we'll have you fixed up in jjiffy." With an unctuous wink, the Shinra President produced a hand towel embroidered with his company's emblem. "I'll just wipe off this… this oil… here… somewhere…"

He turned the creature over several times, unable to find even the slightest smudge.

"Uh… there we go, good as new?"

"CUT!"

"Jimmy, why the hell is that thing still clean?"

"I'm sorry Chris, it just looked so cute and–"

"You're fired!"

"What?"

"Someone oil up the goddamn turtle!"

"You heard the man! What are you waiting for? Pour it on!"

"Ay! This stuff stinks!"

"No más! No más!"

"Did I say to coat the poor bastard? You've turned it into a tar baby, for crap's sake!"

"Where's my turtle? Pedro! Tortuga, rapido! We don't got all day!"

"When's lunch?"

"Fine, just put it in the take!"

"All right, let's try this again. And… ACTION!"

Costa Del Sol: bread and butter of the postcard industry and backdrop to a thousand trashy pinup calendars. Today, however, the mise en scène consists of something a little different from the usual fare of rippled abdomens and greased pectorals. Today the subject is supported not by legs of bronze, but a pair of alabaster columns crawling with the ivy of varicose veins and vanishing into the netted recesses of some extra stretchable neon green swim trunks.

The camera, however, sees none of that. The frame of the shot begins from the waist on up, above a centaurian divide in which the unsightly ergonomic reality of the bottom half is separated from the overwrought makeup and wardrobe of the top half. From the waist on up, naked obesity is transformed into decorated rotundity, something like a modern-day understatement of the plump pomp seen in those old portraits of Henry VIII. For even in the tropical heat, despite the flip-flops and the shorts and the varicose veins, Shinra President Arnold Taft Palmer is forced to keep his signature mustard-brown blazer buttoned around his tapering belly, his jowls perched on the edge of a starched collar, and his gaping rictus bent in the shape of a telegenic smile as he dabs his terrycloth hopelessly at the asphyxiated amphibian languishing in his in his chubby grip.

When he fancied his work done, Palmer held up the motionless creature for the camera. "Erm, there we go… good as new!" He prodded the limp body a few times with his pinky and got no more of a response. "Hey, uh… I think it's dead," he whispered, still wearing his television smile.

"CUT! We'll take care of it in post!"

The film crew dispersed in all directions, chattering amongst themselves as they set down their various equipments and converged on the catering table.

"Somebody get me some tea!" Palmer barked, tossing the dead turtle over his shoulder. The greasy little runt had left dark smudges of petroleum all over his hands, blackening his mood just as much.

Things were about to get worse as one of the production assistants handed him a cool glass of amber liquid garnished with a lemon wedge.

"What the hell is this?"

"Tea."

"Tea? It's not even in a teacup! Besides, it's cold, you nitwit!

"Dude, it's like ninety degrees out here."

Palmer muttered some gibbering complaint as snatched the glass from the P.A. and sucked it down with a sour expression. He was about to swallow it grudgingly when the tea hit his palate – gasoline on a bonfire, as they say. The resulting discharge caused the offending beverage to literally explode from his mouth and nostrils.

Watching Palmer gag on the stuff like it was sulfuric acid, the humble P.A. began to panic. An anthology of scenarios flashed through his mind in an instant. What if the tea had been spiked with cyanide, or anthrax? Like virtually everyone else, this young man had been following the nightmarish story of Karl Brennt's short-lived career as a sharpshooter in Midgar, and his imagination was still marinated in talk of assassination and sabotage. For all he knew, poisoning Shinra's president could be the next step in the very same plot that saw Tuesti shot! And what if Palmer were to die, right then and there? What would that mean for him, the lowly production assistant who all but put the poison cup to the fat man's lips? If he didn't end up convicted of the murder, then he'd certainly be blacklisted from working in film, if not banished from society altogether just for guilt by association!

But nothing of the sort ever happened: Palmer quickly ceased choking, caught his breath, and slapped the P.A. on the back of the head.

"I HATE plain tea! Where's the goddamn sugar!?"

"We don't have any," the young man answered back, still numb from the sudden oscillation between states of absolute shock and relief.

"What about cream?"

"Terribly sorry, sir."

Now it was Palmer's turn to panic.

" … lard?"

The production assistant looked mystified.

"No!" the Palmer screamed, kicking the sand and beating his brow. "No! No! No!"

"Whoa, whoa, hang on a sec!" the P.A. insisted, stammering like the mortified parent who desperately tries to placate their wailing brat in the supermarket. "Maybe… maybe we could put something else in it?"

"Like what?"

"Uh… like, something sweet. Lemonade, maybe? I mean, maybe, if you're cool with that."

"Gee, that's a great idea!"

"R-really? You think so?" The P.A. lowered his defenses and raised his head proudly.

A stinging splash of iced tea hit him square in the face.

"No, you moron!" Arnold Palmer shouted. "I was being sarcastic!"

And that is how a truly refreshing beverage never came to be.


	13. ER Mission

Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle

Part Two: Into the Woods

* * *

.

PALMER: Don't worry little fella, we'll have you cleaned up in a jiffy!

(He dabs the oil-slathered turtle with his hankie, and then, just moments later – as conveyed by the editor's unimpeachable use of the "clock wipe" transition effect – the previously lifeless creature from the "before shot" now looks like a brand new beast!)

PALMER: There we go! Another satisfied customer! Because at the Shinra Electric Power Company–"

LOGO/JINGLE: We care!

**_Click!_**

HOST: You're missing the entire point! This isn't just about one crazed lunatic on a rooftop with a rifle! What happened that night reflects an overall lack of character extending to the highest ranks of Ibsen Oil – nay, more than Ibsen! What Karl Brennt has shown us are the true colors of all these companies swooping in to take Shinra's place. Midgar is lost in the desert and they're circling over it like vultures! They're nothing but a bunch of opportunist crooks exploiting our hardships, leading us astray–

GUEST: Oh please, Bob, enough with this empty knee-jerk rhetoric! The fact of the matter is we don't have enough information to make an objective assessment. And until we get better idea of what happened, it's paramount that we refrain from baseless conjecture! Do we even know what Mr. Brennt's motive was, or how he obtained the deadly assault weapon? Granted, it looks bad, but–"

**_Click!_**

PRESIDENT IBSEN: I've always considered this company to be a family of sorts, and having seen so many tragedies befall it in the past few days… it's just… it's absolutely devastating. First the attack on another one of our refineries, and now this…

Karl Brennt was an outstanding employee and a close friend to many of us at the company. I can't… I can't even begin to imagine what would lead him to such a horrible end.

That being said, in these times I can only do two things: first, I extend my sincerest condolences to those who have been impacted in some way or another by these recent disasters; secondly, I will make it my mission to see that Ibsen Oil continues its operations on the Northern Continent, undeterred by the actions of cowardly terrorists or any other enemy of the peace. Through this company's determination and the support of this great city, we will bring stability to the Middle North and secure a sustainable energy source for future generations around the world!

**_Click!_**

ANCHORMAN: We now go live to the scene with Wanda Erdbeeren. Wanda?

REPORTER: Thank you Dan. We're here outside of Sector Three Memorial Hospital, where we are told WRO leader Reeve Tuesti is being treated for a gunshot wound in his left shoulder, sustained just two days ago in what experts are already calling the most bizarre assassination attempt of all time. Doctors say Tuesti is in stable condition, and is expected to be discharged in approximately one week…

"What the–"

Reeve dropped the television remote and drew back the curtains on his bedside window.

"Up there!"

"It's him!"

"Mr. Tuesti, any comments on the experience of being shot?"

"Ugh…"

The curtains closed once more and the television resumed its channel shuffle, settling finally on an educational program about chocobo breeding.

"_For energetic ones like these I like to use a Luchille nut…"_

Far from the urbane and charismatic orator last seen stumping in Wall Market, the Reeve Tuesti of present circumstances was haggard enough to pass for a wood-dwelling cannibal. His face was pale and bloodless, and his eyes appeared as shallow pits sulking between the randomly strewn tangles of his grungy black hair; pain had twisted his mouth into a snarling a grimace, like a clenched fist of tooth and beard. Indeed, the last thirty-six hours had not been kind to the man, and it showed.

The first twenty hours of the ordeal had thankfully passed in Reeve's sleep, and for that he was grateful. By his account, he had been standing on the stage one moment and lying in the back of an ambulance the next, by which point he had already begun descending rapidly into morphine's euphoric grip. By the time the paramedics got him to the hospital he had lost consciousness, which he wouldn't fully regain it until the following evening.

Until then, the first order of business in the Emergency Ward would be to clean the wound and expedite its closure with a cure spell – a useful tool grudgingly referred to as "holistic therapy" among stauncher purists of the medical orthodoxy. Though they may be considerably humbled, the wonders of modern medicine are not entirely without place in a world of mega-potions and materia: in matters of more serious injuries such as Mr. Tuesti's, the immediate but unfocused art of the white mage can only do so much, and so the methodical and concentrated craft of the surgeon becomes needed (while doctors tend to specialize in one or the other, they are all required to have at least some training in both areas of practice).

Yet while science and magic both have the power to facilitate recovery, the act itself ultimately falls to the afflicted. Every organism possesses a particular _élan vital_ from which it comes into its own unique shape; therefore, because only the self can know its true form, no one else can restore it. And yet it is precisely on this point that most hospitals fail. While proficient in administering treatment to others, the sanatorium tends to impede the essential process of healing oneself, as patients are fitted with accommodations entirely discordant with one's personal sense of well being. Those who have been need not be convinced of this, for they already have a special place in their heart for that oppressive stench of ammonia cleaner; for those endless halls of vinyl composition tile, burnished with the antiseptic glare of fluorescent lights; and for the sounds, those awful, ghastly echoes carrying the cryptic whispers of machines and medical professionals casually discussing another man's matter of life and death… No wonder then that hospitals should be one of the few places where people receive those garish Mylar balloons: anything distracting from their surroundings, no matter how offensive to the eye, can only be an improvement!

All these dreary little things listed (minus the balloons) came included with Reeve's stay at Sector Three Memorial. Taken with the media circus now gathered in the parking lot, it would have been enough to put him in a bad mood even without the ballistic trauma to his shoulder (being as it was, he was outright livid).

"_When a female's in heat, it's important to supplement her diet with fresh gysahl greens…"_

"E-excuse me," one of the nurses peeked in timidly, "Mr. Tuesti? There are some people here waiting to see you–"

"Tell 'em to suck a lemon!"

"Sounds like someone's feeling better," a familiar voice replied teasingly.

Reeve peeled his stagnant gaze from the hospital TV and found Tifa Lockhart standing at his bedside, hand pertly placed on her hip; and Cloud, predictably aloof, leaning in the doorjamb with his arms crossed.

Reeve offered an apology colored by more frustration than contrition, explaining to his friends why he had initially mistaken them for reporters.

"I wasn't expecting you so soon," he reasoned, "what with the PSS keeping you and all."

"You know about that?"

"Oh yes, one of my aides filled me in on the details this morning. I take it the interrogations weren't too unpleasant?"

"Reno went easy on us," Cloud grumbled, "'_for old time's sake'_."

"Hm, that's the komisch commish for you."

"I'd heard he'd gone into law enforcement, but this…" Tifa shook her head, still incredulous toward the whole affair. "I had no idea he was that high up."

"Indeed," muttered Reeve, "who would have guessed that working for Shinra could translate so easily into working for our current government?"

"Everything about this stinks!" suddenly escaped through Cloud's teeth. "The guys who questioned us didn't even care about what we had to say, they just nodded like we were crazy and wrote the whole thing off as a case of Brennt losing his mind and blowing himself up. I kept telling them, it wasn't a bomb, it was his body that detonated! It was like those spontaneous combustions, I saw it with my own eyes!"

"Well, as it stands the story tarnishes the Ibsen name quite nicely, which is rather fortunate for a certain influential corporation," Reeve observed. "Incidentally, this would also be our police commissioner's former-employer."

Seeing how their conversation was turning more sensitive by the minute, Tifa took it upon herself to pull Cloud into the room and shut the door behind them.

"Listen," she said, "I'm just as concerned as the rest of you, but now's not the time to be getting into paranoid conspiracy theories!"

"No," said Cloud, "I think it's long overdue. There were things I saw that night... things no one else saw." His tone had become startlingly grim, even for his usual gloomy disposition. "I don't know how to say this, but… I think this happened because of me."

Reeve looked at Cloud as if he were a hallucination. "Y-you?"

"I was hired to deliver a package at the exact time and place as the shooting. Whoever planned this wanted to make sure I was there to see it."

"We've been over this already," Tifa groaned. "I saw Brennt drop that letter off at the diner. No one else is responsible."

"He might have dropped it off, but the envelope was marked from Shinra Manor."

"What?" Tifa was greatly upset to learn this new information – the news itself was certainly terrifying enough, but more than that she couldn't believe the nerve of Cloud to keep such a secret from her.

"And you say the PSS simply dismissed this information?" Reeve shook his head in amazement.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves!" Tifa broke in irritably. Apparently she still didn't believe what she was hearing, or she didn't want to. "Whatever was written on the envelope, it's still only just writing. That letter could've said it came from the moon, for all that it matters!"

"I opened it up. It had the picture in it."

"What picture?"

"_The_ _picture._"

"You mean…" A twinge of fear prevented Tifa from finishing her sentence.

Reeve scratched his beard intently. "Shinra… it has to be. But why? Why give themselves away so easily?"

"I'm not so sure it's that simple…" Cloud began hesitantly. "This is going to sound crazy, but, for what it's worth… I've been having these dreams lately… about a voice telling me to go to Nibelheim."

Silence reigned. The stuffy hospital air suddenly became that much harder to breathe.

"Cloud… I don't know if it's someone out there or it's something inside of you… but whatever it is, whatever's haunting you, it doesn't control you or your actions." Tifa laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. "You don't have to go through with this, you can still say no."

"No," he said darkly, shrugging off her touch. "What happened at Wall Market was designed to lure me to Nibleheim, plain and simple. If don't take the bait now, more people are going to get hurt until I do."

"But you'd be walking into a trap…"

"What other choice do I have? Someone out there knows my secrets… someone with powerful connections. There's no running away from this, Tifa." Cloud's severe expression started to crack, and a great weariness showed through. "I'm tired of running..."

"What if it's not a trap? What if there's nothing in Nibelheim at all? Have you considered that maybe these people just want you out of Midgar so they can take another shot at Reeve?"

"Then I guess it's a good thing you'll be here to keep an eye on things while I'm gone," Cloud murmurred.

With a reluctant sigh, Tifa swallowed a hundred things she wanted to say and silently conceded.

"That settles it; I'm going with you!"

All eyes fell on Reeve.

"You… can't be serious…" Tifa managed to stammer.

"Oh no, I'm _quite_ serious. It's clear to me now that the recent attempt on my life is just one piece to the puzzle of conspiracy and corruption that has swept over Midgar." He turned to Cloud with a wink. "And you'll need an experienced spy to help you expose those responsible!"

"Aren't you forgetting about your health? Can you even get out of bed?"

"What, are you kidding? It's just a flesh wound!" Reeve lifted his injured arm to prove his mettle, only to recoil in agony.

"But that's beside the point," he quickly added, still wincing. "I've never been the physical type anyway, which is why I won't be accompanying you in person…" Reeve gently tapped an index finger on his right temporal lobe.

An enormous lavender creature with the arms of a gorilla and the legs of a jackrabbit bounded out from the closet with a costumed tuxedo cat on its head.

Cait Sith and his anonymous moogle mount: the brains and brawn of the operation, respectively.

Actually, if you want to get technical about it, Reeve is the real brains of the operation; Cait is just a proxy, a puppet echoing his commands. Kind of like how the moogle is a puppet echoing Cait's commands. Which are actually Reeve's commands…

Whoa, meta.

Tifa looked to Reeve with a quizzical expression. "Really, do you take this thing everywhere you go?"

"It's a habit I've formed since my last public appearance. Can't get enough protection these days."

"That's right!" Cait chimed in. "If some schmuck tries anything funny – _bam! _ Right in the kisser!

The stuffed moogle seconded this motion with a flurry of punches, which in their clumsiness and ardor bucked Cait from his mount and sent the toy cat flying across the room.

The airborne aluroid caught itself on the first thing within its grasp: two handfuls of blonde forelock.

Cloud's expression of utter horror and deadpan disgust gave Tifa the first real laugh she'd had in days.

"Bubbie! Long time no see!" Gripping the blonde spikes like reigns, Cait hung upiside-down from Cloud's forehead and gave him a big plushy smooch on the nose. "Did ya miss me?"

"Not really." Cloud plucked the toy off his face and tossed it to Reeve. "Is the ventriloquist act really necessary?"

"Someone's gotta put words in the dummy's mouth, right?" Cait snickered and patted Reeve on the head. "After all, he's a political figure!"

Apparently, no matter how lousy he felt, Reeve always had the spirits to keep his puckish avatar in character. The incongruity of their two personalities interacting side by side, however, was just plain awkward, if not alarming for genuinely alarming to onlookers.

"So then, whattaya say?" Cait extended a white mitt to Cloud. "Partners?"

"Yeah, sure," he droned, humorlessly shaking hands with his cartoonish teammate.

"We're going too," an additional voice growled.

And then, to everyone's surprise, Red XIII and Vincent Valentine entered the room.

"Jeez, it hasn't even been a week since someone's tried to kill Mr. Toots here and already they're letting Dracula and the wolfman prowl outside his door!" Cait looked at Reeve with a snicker. "Boy, if I was you I'd be feeling _real_ safe right now…"

"Err, forgive the intrusion," Red began diplomatically. "We were waiting for our turn to visit, in accordance with hospital rules, and, well, I have good ears…"

"And so now you want to help us investigate Nibelheim?"

"Yes," Vincent answered harshly.

As usual, Nanaki found himself having to enlarge upon his partner's brusque responses. "Vincent and I came to Midgar looking for some way to help the Planet. Tifa suggested that we would pursue this goal best under your direction, Reeve. We were planning on speaking with you about it after your rally, but… well, now we're here." He paused slightly. "Anyhow, this task suits our abilities rather well, and if we can somehow further your cause, I have no doubt the Planet will benefit as a result."

Vincent nodded in agreement.

"I see…" For the first time since he'd woken in the hospital, Reeve's trademark smirk of satisfaction came back to his face. "Welcome aboard then, gentlemen. Your services are always appreciated."

"Are you sure about this?" Tifa whispered to Cloud.

"It'll be fine. I'm sure we can handle whatever they've got over there. Besides," he added with a weak attempt at a smile, "I thought you were through caring about me."

"Just be careful. I have a bad feeling about this."

Cloud's eyes dropped. "Yeah, same here."


	14. Coming and Going

"Sir."

"Yes?"

"I bring good news. Our sources have informed me that Strife is headed this way by airship."

"Then he's accepted the invitation. Everything is proceeding just as planned."

"I'm glad."

"Now then, our guest of honor should be arriving in a matter of days, and we still have yet to acquire certain provisions for the homecoming, do we not?"

"not to worry, sir, the Soldiers will be arriving tomorrow as requested."

"Good. And your sister? Has she returned from the North yet?"

"She's here now. Do you wish to see her?"

"By all means, bring her in! I have a new assignment for her."

"Right away sir."

Rude left the study to fetch the woman in question.

"So then, you've taken the bait. Predictable, as always." The man in white leaned back in his wheelchair and quite literally cracked a smile in his crumbling face. "Dear, dear Cloud... if only you knew what I have planned for you…"

.

.

.

Cloud leaned over the railing on the Highwind's upper deck, watching the verdant fields below rolling by between the stroboscopic shutters of yellow hair whipping across his face. It had been a long while since he'd last seen the Planet in its naked greenness -- as long as it had been since he'd last screwed on the nuts-and-bolts armor over his dingy Prussian blue garments and carried the burden of a broadsword on his back.

"_We're in the woods now. No turning back."_

He gazed down and reflected on how remarkable it was, this little world panning beneath him; how remarkable that for all its rigid contours and structures formed over thousands of years, he was now able to watch it all blow by like piss in the wind. The landscape came and went in three stages: flooding forward, vanishing under the bow of the vessel, and then reemerging out the back. It was almost as if the airship was swallowing, digesting and crapping out the whole countryside in one constant stream.

This got Cloud thinking: about life, about his circumstances... about the fluidity with which all things come and go.

He remembered something Reeve (or rather, Cait Sith) had once told him, shortly after Aeris had been murdered:

"This too shall pass."

Cloud never figured out how this was supposed to make him feel any better. So things pass, and then what? Is that all life is, just something to pass, a bowel movement from the Planet? Is the sole purpose of our existence to become manure for the next generation of seedlings?

Cloud considered the possibility as he reflected on his present situation, and how, by forces known and unknown to him, it, too, had come to pass.

.

.

.

With the toy cat acting as his reach, the bedridden Reeve had just finished setting up his control station for operating Cait Sith. Until now, no one from Avalanche had seen how their one and only telecommuting member manipulated his avatar from behind the scenes. To tell the truth, apart from the little trick he pulled with the BCI in his head, the results were sadly anti-climactic; Reeve's manual interface proved to be far simpler than any of his teammates could have imagined: a laptop, a headset, and a simple gray plastic handheld control pad comprised the apparatus in its entirety.

He was in the middle of testing the connections a brown paper sack fell into the middle of his workstation.

"Got that stuff you wanted," Cloud announced listlessly.

"All of it?"

Cloud rolled his eyes. "Pastrami Reuben, two pickles, and a seltzer."

"Excellent work, my friend! I can't begin to tell you how much I loathe that hash they sling here."

"No problem."

"Oh, and while you were gone, I was able to arrange our flight into Nibelheim. We leave first thing tomorrow!"

"So you finally got in touch with Cid?"

"Not exactly," Reeve confessed between several bites of beef and bread, "I spoke with one of his crew. No one's been able to reach our good captain for the last two days. They say he went out in the Tiny Bronco, refusing to answer to anyone until he gets back."

"What? Why would just up and disappear like that?"

"Who knows? Probably escaping from stress at home. 'Personal reasons,' that's all they'll tell me."

"Oh."

"Anyway, I thought it best if we were to avoid flying directly into town. Although the enemy is probably expecting us already, I don't want to make our arrival so obvious as that. Therefore, unless you have any objections, the current plan is to land behind the cover of Mount Nibel and make our way to Shinra Manor on foot."

"All right. Vincent and I know the area well enough... I'll let him know next time he steps out of the shadows."

Reeve chuckled faintly, wincing as the laughter tugged on the his wound.

"Hey, you all right?"

"Fine," he answered through clenched teeth, "It's fine!"

"You sure? Maybe you ought to ask for some more morphine."

"I said I'm fine!" Reeve hissed. "I can't afford to get doped up out of my mind at a time like this, not when so much is at stake..."

Cloud nodded understandingly. "Okay then. Moving on..."

"Right. So, by the navigator's estimation, we should be arriving shortly before nightfall. Any questions?"

"Just one."

"Hm?"

"What do we do once we get into the mansion?"

Reeve took a pickle from his lunch and gnawed on it thoughtfully. "That's a good one…"

.

.

.

With a little altitude, even the biggest and brightest structures in Midgar are dwarfed under the unlimited expanse of the night sky. Although the glare of city lights obscures a great deal of the stars and their constellations, in return citizens may ponder the spectacularly muddy haze blocking their view. If you have ever looked up at night and found yourself unable to decide whether the sky was some shade of purple, orange, gray, or brown, then you too have experienced this peculiar feature of urban nocturnal life. I may be completely wrong in this, but it's my belief that this phenomenon is the result of the evening fog catching and preserving the full spectrum of light given off by every neon sign, traffic signal, and streetlamp in the city. In turn, the fog's intricate matrix of constantly oscillating particles reflects all these sources of light from a multitude of angles in perpetual flux, effectively creating a firmament which appears to be suffused with several distinct colors at once. Meanwhile, light sources themselves are likely to pierce through this multivalent farrago of their collective effort, delineating the city beneath in sparks of pearl, amber and jade.

It was before such a scene that Vincent Valentine sought a moment's repose from the stuffy hospital air. Perched like a displaced stone gargoyle on the utilitarian masonry of the roof, he looked out over the glittering city and contemplated his significance in it. Although these flossy Midgar nights had always bothered him (the whole point of night is that it's dark), he nonetheless felt an undeniable gravity looking at it now; tomorrow he would leave for Nibelheim with guarantee of returning to Midgar… or even returning at all.

His meditations were interrupted by the echoing peal of footsteps in the stairwell. Vincent recognized them immediately. That burdened step without any extra weight in it, that way of dragging without actually slowing down…

Cloud's footsteps.

He pretended not to notice as the ex-Soldier approached him from behind.

"Vincent?"

Without turning from the ledge, he greeted Cloud with a grunt flung over his shoulder: "Hm."

"I, uh, I just wanted to say thanks… for tagging along."

Vincent shrugged. "It's what I do."

"Yeah… right."

The next few beats went by silence. The cold rush of traffic could be heard coursing through the city's veins.

"Say Vincent, do you… I mean, I was wondering…"

"Yes?"

"I, ah… nevermind."

"Okay then."

Another silence, longer and more awkward than the first.

"So, uh, I was wondering," Cloud began again, "if you remember the day before our final battle, two years ago."

"Yes."

"I didn't want anyone coming along without something special to fight for."

"I remember."

"Well, uh, it sort of occurred to me that you never mentioned what your reason for fighting was."

"Thinking about what Nanaki said back at the church?"

"It's just… why do you do it? Saving the world is nice and all, but there has to be a personal stake in it too, right? No offense, but do you have anything left in this world worth saving?"

"Honestly, I'm not sure what it is that I'm fighting for. I guess I never was."

"But…" Cloud's granite expression chiseled itself into a frown. "You knew I didn't want anyone going without their own reason to… and now after all this time you're telling me that you just cheated and went ahead anyway?"

"I guess you could put it that way." Vincent shrugged. "Your reason was interesting though."

Cloud recalled his exact words: "A very personal memory."

"Now that seems like cheating to me," Vincent droned. "It's not like you can save the past from destruction." His severe countenance attempted its own botched version of a smirk. "Not if you keep it to yourself, anyway."

"Sorry. Like I said, it's personal."

"Hm. Whatever you say, cheater."

"Look who's talking," Cloud grumbled, heading for the stairs.

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.

.

Standing on the upper deck of the Highwind, Cloud leaned against the railing and watched the world pass him by like piss in the wind: there was Midgar, ebbing behind and vanishing on the horizon; and there was Kalm, with its pretty blue cobblestones, spires, and whatnot; and there, just ahead…

There he saw a walnut tree.


	15. The Rain Gives a Lot

Barret's nostrils flared hungrily, eager to leave the stench of Midgar behind and drink from the limpid skies on the horizon. Shinra had given Avalanche one hell of a sendoff, you had to give them that: Hojo's mutants, the robots on the elevator, Soldiers on motorcycles, that fire-breathing monster truck thing back on there on the freeway – it had been a long night, that was for damn sure. Everyone was covered in sweat and odor, soot and blood, motor grease and the smell of burning rubber…

And it felt great.

He snorted loudly and turned around to bid the city one last farewell, hocking a soot-filled loogie on its crystal polymer walls.

"Been in stuck in that hole for too damn long. Almost forgot the Planet's more than just a word."

Aeris studied the cracked, jaundiced earth beneath their feet. "I've never seen it before," she confessed, her voice heavy with equal measures of wonder and regret.

Red XIII shook his locks in disbelief. _The last of the Cetra… and she's never even left the city? Grandfather, if only you could see this…_

"This dustbowl ain't nothing, girl, just wait till we get a little northwest, then you'll really see what's up." Barret's ripened smile shone though all the bloody scrapes and fatigue on his face. "There's a whole world of green out there, bigger than your wildest dreams!"

"I don't know… my dreams can get pretty big."

"Take my word for it," Cloud chimed in, "this is going to be bigger."

"Speaking of which," said Tifa, "Maybe we ought to split this act up?" She stepped in between Cloud and Aeris, pulling the former into the center of the group. "I mean, since we're wanted fugitives, it's probably not such a good idea to go strolling together out in the open like one big happy family, you know?"

"Good point."

"And if we do decide to go in separate groups," she continued, "then we'll need an overall group leader, _won't we?" _

Cloud felt a coercive elbow prod him in the back.

"Uh, I guess, maybe if‒"

"No! Nuh-uh! Hell no!" Barret put his foot down with a dusty thud. "Leaders are for fascist states and marching bands, not for Avalanche! We gotta keep it real, like we always do!"

"But this isn't like always. We're tracking down Sephiroth, and no one knows how to do that better than Cloud."

Aeris nodded in agreement.

"It's not really my place to say," commented Red XIII, cocking his head with an air of indifference. "I'm only following your party as long as we're headed toward Cosmo Canyon."

"Then the majority has spoken," Tifa declared, clasping Aeris' hand in solidarity. "Cloud wins, two to one!"

Barret looked at the women with a wry grimace. "Yeah, yeah, I see what's going on here, same way it always happens… freedom's fine and dandy till some handsome face comes along; then you gotta have yourselves a poster boy givin' out orders!"

"That's enough, all of you."

The group fell silent as Cloud came forward. Quite embarrassed with all the unwanted attention he was receiving, he was especially annoyed for having to compound that embarrassment now by demanding everyone's attention in order to disown it.

"Look," he began, fumbling his way into a assertive tenor, "I'm not here to be anyone's leader or tell you guys what to do. If the group wants me to steer the ship for a while, fine, I can do that. But as far as I'm concerned, nobody on this team has authority over anyone else… okay?"

"Okay."

"Sure."

"Fair enough."

"Hey Barret, did I hear you call Cloud handsome a second ago?"

"Shut up."

.

.

.

"_Warm light… glass, round glass… chubby glass... happy glass…"_

"Yo, I asked you a question!"

"Huh?" Cloud peeled his lethargic gaze from the paraffin lamp on the nightstand. "What'd you say?"

"I said, if you're leading us 'cause you know so much about Sephiroth, when are we gonna see some of that knowledge?"

"Oh, uh… I'll tell you about it when we're all together."

"You mean when _she_ gets back," said Barret.

"Yeah, that's what I mean."

"It's been an hour now…"

"Let her enjoy it," said Red. "She's never truly been outside before today."

"But it's going to rain."

"I'd think that would be the least of your worries," said Tifa. "Shinra's probably got a price on our heads by now."

Cloud bit his lip and nodded swiftly. "Okay, I'm going out there to find her. In the meantime, we ought to have a better way of keeping in touch with each other, so something like this doesn't happen again."

"Hm…"

"Ah!" Tifa exhaled, holding up her finger as an exclamation mark. "What if we all had walkie-talkies? You know, like those THX things or whatever they're called… maybe we can find someplace here that sells them?"

Barret scratched his head. "I dunno, this Kalm town is kinda… rustic."

"Oh, don't be such a naysayer! You agree with me, don't you, Cloud?"

"Uh… I'll let you three work it out. Just make sure you're back at the inn before dark. I shouldn't be gone any longer than that."

"And if you are?" asked Red XIII.

Cloud threw him a pair of sweaty gauntlets. "You have any tracking dog in you?"

.

.

Cloud rushed through the open pastures around the town of Kalm, anxious to a dot of pink on the countryside. Given the even landscape and Aeris' colorful taste in garments, he knew it wouldn't be very difficult to pick her out among the scenery.

That's what worried him.

Twenty minutes later he spotted her in the distance, reclined under a lone walnut tree.

"Aeris!" He charged clumsily into the plain head on, barreling toward the impending squall. "Aeris!"

He finally caught up to her, huffing and puffing.

_This is what I get for outrunning her the other day, _he thought.

"Hi Cloud."

"Whatareyou--" he stopped to catch his breath "--what are you doing… all the way out here… it's about to rain…"

"Of course it is! That's what I'm here for."

"Huh?"

"Really, I wouldn't miss it for the world! I never got to see this sort of thing in the slums, you know."

_Never? _

The word sounded vigorously through Cloud's brain, loosening a yolky trickle of pictures and sensations from his clotted memory: the smell of autumn leaves crunching beneath his feet, the sound of rain drizzling on the roof, the taste of snowflakes…

"Aeris, I…" He sat on the ground beside her. "I'm sorry..."

"I'm not," she said. "Why dwell on the past? I'm just looking forward to all the experiences I have ahead of me."

"Yeah, you have your whole life ahead of you."

"Hey Cloud!" She turned to him impetuously, verging on giddiness as the idea popped into her head: "What's your favorite kind of weather?"

He mused a bit, picked up the empty husk of a worm-eaten walnut, tossed it aside, and mused some more. "I like it a little cloudy, I guess," he said at last.

Aeris let out a hearty guffaw.

"What's so funn‒ oh… right." Cloud slumped forward with a rueful smile.

Even when it was at his expense, he couldn't help but grin at the sound of her laughter. It always threw people off the first time they heard it: they'd look around the room perplexed, wondering who could have made such a raucous sound ‒ certainly not this delicate creature; a girl of her breeding couldn't produce anything more than a demure giggle!

"Well, what about you?" Cloud continued. "What kind of weather do you like? From what you've seen, I mean."

"Me?" Aeris stood up at once, turning her wide-eyed gaze to the turbid skies above. "I like the rain."

"Really? I never would've figured you for the gloomy type."

"Gloomy? What are you talking about?" She shut her eyes and twirled on her toes, orbiting an entire world within her own senses. "Listen… you can hear the trees, the ground… you can hear how happy they are. They've all been waiting for the rain!"

"Hm… the rain does give a lot, doesn't it?"

Suddenly Cloud felt a fleck of something on his forehead, so imperceptible in its delicacy that at first he believed it to be nothing more than a trick of his imagination.

But then there more flecks. Swimming through the wind and falling by the millions, they descended on Cloud like a dew-mouthed fleet of sprites: landing playful pecks here on his elbows and ticklish pinpricks there on his earlobes, flitting across his face and flirting with the nape of his neck, frisking his skin and teasing the tip of his nose with kisses no bigger than the hair of a blackberry ‒ and always already somewhere else by the time he could tell where the last one had fallen.

"It's here!" cried Aeris, "the rain is here!"

"Wait!" Cloud cried after her, "come back!"

But it was too late. She was already gone: bounding through the fields, whooping and whirling like a maenad drunk on raindrops...

Cloud chased down and caught up to Aeris with little trouble. Reaching her, however, was another matter: despite all his petitions and protests, nothing seemed to get through.

"Enough already!" he pleaded. "We're gonna get soaked!"

She laughed with blithe indifference. "Come on, relax a little!"

"This isn't exactly my idea of relaxing!"

"Listen! The plants are singing! Can you hear them? There hasn't been any rain in a month!"

"I don't hear any‒ okay, forget all that for a minute. What if Shinra spotted us out here?"

"We'd clobber them!"

"You could catch a cold‒"

"I'd get better."

"What if‒"

"What if the sun burns out tomorrow? What if some asteroid crushes us a year from now? What's the point of life if you go through it worrying about 'what if' the whole time? Sometimes we just gotta live like it's our last day, you know?"

Cloud sighed and lowered his head in defeat. "I… I still don't hear anything."

"Then look," she said, gently lifting his head.

He loosened his cramped routine stare, and, for the first time that he could remember, granted his eyes permission to wander with acceptant and unassuming curiosity.

What he saw then was beautiful, truly – not like some airbrushed photograph on a shellacked postcard, not some manicured acre beneath a carefully selected and stagnant sky. This was Nature in all Her untrammeled glory: churning, roiling, full of change and chance, Sturm und Drang…

And Cloud felt himself happily lost in its current, allowing himself to be led into a world of pure activity by the whims of this sylph, this sylvan spirit called Aeris Gainsborough.

Together they ran, the rain beating down on their heads. Aeris was giggling, gasping for air, and producing similarly wordless convulsions as she took his hand and steered him through a directionless dash across the plain.

It was in that loss of total control that an unbearably fuzzy, pneumatic sensation occurred in the pit of Cloud's chest: like a zither struggling to find its voice, it swelled and clawed at his core, yearning for release. And when the clouds began to unravel ‒ when the sun seeped through their crystalline vapor like streams of golden candy dripping from a sieve ‒ when the relentless downpour had tenderized his face into a numb aura of its former self ‒ when all the dry-preserved aromas in the land were suddenly refreshed and germinating in his nostrils ‒ when he saw that oblique shimmer in the flower girl's eyes, that oscillating spark which seemed to be in a constant state of reappearing without ever vanishing, like the old phantom lurking between the pauses and steps of a baroque dance, or the wriggling daemon pinned beneath the violinist's steadfast pinky – when he saw those strange smiling eyes, glowing like will-o'-the-wisps in a dark and wild thicket of dripping brown locks and ringlets – when all these things collided in Cloud's heart, that little zither in his chest cried out with all its might, and cherubic laughter flowed from his lips without obstacle, pure and unspoiled.

"It's nice to get out of the city every now and then, isn't it?" a familiar voice growled.

Rudely shaken from his reverie, Cloud's scowl darkened as he suddenly found himself back on the Highwind's observation deck, joined now by Red XIII.

"Is that why you were so eager come along?" he replied cuttingly.

Red sighed and turned his attention to the pastures flowing beneath them. "I'm here for one reason: to save this Planet… "

"So you really think we're onto something that big, huh?"

"If it's connected to this whole energy crisis fiasco, as the evidence suggests, then yes, I'd say so."

"So now you think we can solve the energy crisis?"

"We can try," said Red. "We succeeded once before, did we not?"

"Things are different now. Saving the Planet from monsters is one thing… but from people?" Cloud shook his head.

"Hmm… it's like Tifa said to me the other night: 'saving the world is a tough act to follow.'"

Cloud slumped over the guardrail. "She's right you know. Where do you go from there?"

"Well, in your case, I think saving yourself would be a good place to start."

"Save myself? From what?"

"Despair."

A cynical smirk passed over Cloud's face. "Hm. So the Planet's not enough; there has to be a personal stake in it too, eh?"

"It would seem you have yet to succeed in the latter," observed Red.

"Yeah? Well what about you? You might think you have all the answers now, but one day, after you've put down your something-thousandth book, you're going to look up at the real world and see that it's nothing like the one you preach." Cloud cast a dull sneer in Red's direction. "Honestly, how can you have a heart and go around telling people to take comfort in knowing that their loved ones are living on as a rock or a cactus somewhere?"

"Those who haven't forgotten how to listen to the Planet can sense the soul in all things."

"But I can't!" Cloud cried in frustration. "I can't make something out of nothing!" He looked back in the direction of the walnut tree, which the airship had long since passed. "Some people… some people can, but… I'm not one of them."

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**Author's Note:** The scene in which Cloud and Aeris run through the rain is derived from a Japanese doujinshi (fan comic) called "Mother". Credit is therefore due to the artist, whose works can be found at _.jp/asahi/junk/g/ff/ _. My reasoning for borrowing so liberally from another person's work is simple: I consider it an indelible addition to the mythology of Final Fantasy VII (some of you might call it "fanon"). Whatever it is, such a scene, once viewed, cannot be (in my mind) separated from the game on which it's based without some sense of diminishment (an originary lack, if you will), and that is the ultimate achievement for any fan work. It is therefore with great reverence and respect that I include someone else's scenario in this chapter. However, this scene was not merely included for its own sake: as the story progresses, the reader will see that it foreshadows an event involved in deciding the story's outcome.


	16. Ahead on Our Way

The sun had scarcely begun to descend from its zenith when the Highwind crossed the westernmost heights of Mount Nibel. From the sea of fog on which the ship so gently fared, the great mountain jutted out like a cluster of black icebergs, dashing the clouds like foaming waves on its crooked cusps.

Cait Sith stood on bridge with the crew, looking out on this sublime sight from behind the ship's reinforced polycarbonate windshield.

But then, when you think about it, isn't Cait Sith always looking from behind something? Behind the painted-on mask that communicates his perpetually laughing expression to the outside world, or behind the sober, unblinking camera lens hidden underneath; behind all this lurks another set eyes, the gaze of a man who could be watching from anywhere in the world, a gaze that is never physically present and yet somehow always felt in some unsettling way by those who are aware of it.

Having satisfied himself with view, Cait turned his cybernetic gaze starboard and addressed the young aeronaut at the helm.

"Hey, how long till we land?"

"Not long at all," answered the steersman. "Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, tops."

"Way to go, skipper! We owe you one!"

"Hey, don't mention it. Any friends of the captain are friends to his crew."

Cait wrung his tail anxiously. "Yeah…"

"Something the matter?"

"I was just thinking… has there been any word on Cid?"

"Not since yesterday," said the steersman. "Not to worry though, you can be sure the he's just on a good old retreat, nothing more."

"But what could he possibly be retreating from?"

"Haven't the foggiest." The steersman's shoulders shrugged beneath his navy-blue peacoat. "He told us it was personal reasons, and that's all the reasons we need to know."

"I guess…"

"What do you mean, 'you guess'? Surely you're not the type of fella who goes about snooping into other people's business?"

Cait twirled his whiskers and grinned. "Of course not."

.

.

.

Cloud sat in the engine room inert, lulled into a listless stupor by the droning moto perpetuo of a thousand cogs and pistons. He recalled how Bugenhagen had fallen in love with the place at first sight, zipping around and shouting some nonsense like "ho, ho! I love the smell of machinery! You can smell the greatness of man's knowledge!"

The only thing Cloud smelled was smog and rancid axel grease.

"HEYCLOUDWATCHYADOIN?!"

"Gah!" He jerked back as Cait Sith barged in with the subtlety of a bicycle horn.

"What's the matter?"

"Damn it, Reeve, you almost gave me a heart attack!"

"Sorry."

"What do you want?"

"I just talked to the pilot."

"And?"

"And we'll be landing soon."

"Great."

"And, uh, I also wanted to you ask you something."

"So ask me something," grumbled Cloud.

At that moment the moogle held out a simple rucksack. Cait jumped in promptly, poking his head out the top.

"Now that the cat's outta the bag, I was wondering if I could get a piggyback ride from you."

Cloud's face showed a thorough lack of amusement.

"Seriously though, I need you to schlep me around for a while."

"I thought that was _his_ job," Cloud muttered, indicating the pink elephantine creature in the room.

"Yeah, that's sort of the problem," Cait tittered sheepishly. "I want to send the big guy back with the ship to Rocket Town."

"What? Why the hell would you want to do that?"

Reeve's voice crackled through a ring of speaker holes on the moogle's back: _"I'm terribly sorry about all this, really, but I need to know what would cause Cid to run out the way he did. That, and… well, I have a personal matter of my own to settle with him…"_

"That leaves three of us capable of fighting… not to mention more equipment for the rest of us to carry…"

Reeve reiterated his apologies in the calm and articulate fashion one would expect from a political speaker. Conversely, the moogle channeling his carefully composed words gesticulated their meaning to a very different effect, beating its brow wildly and covering its face in shame. The resulting disconnect left an odd impression on Cloud, to say the least.

"Whatever," he mumbled, taking the backpack with Cait and slinging it over his shoulder with a shrug. "I'm used to working in threes anyway."

"_I'm not so sure that will be necessary," _said Reeve. "_They tell me there's a good chance Cid might be coming home tonight. Either way, I can always have the moogle follow Cait's signal to your location on autopilot before we head out to the mountains tomorrow. It's not a very long hike for a machine, you know."_

"I'll keep that in mind."

"_Good. In the meantime, I'll be watching both units constantly, switching back and forth to see how everyone's doing. Right?"_

"Righteeo!" cheered Cait.

Cloud couldn't help but chuckle as Reeve offered him a pink plushy handshake to seal the deal.

.

.

.

"You could have at least given Vincent and I some say in the matter," Red grumbled, rather unhappy at being loaded up like a packhorse.

"What's done is done," said Cloud, smirking inwardly. "No use in dwelling on the past, right?"

Red muttered something inaudible.

"Hey, don't look at me," Cait whimpered, peeking out from the pack on Cloud's back. "It was Sergeant Bedsore back at HQ who decided to break up the band!"

Red grunted as the trail began to shift uphill. "Really… was it necessary to bring so much?"

"We need this stuff."

"You mean you need it," the beast growled. "I don't require weapons to fight, I can sleep on the ground, and I can forage for sustenance just fine."

"I wouldn't recommend that," Vincent chimed in tonelessly. "Once we reach the mountains, anything you find is likely to be contaminated from the old mako reactor. It will be at least ten years before it's safe to drink the water there, I think."

This time Cloud was unable to hide his smirk. "There's your answer. Keep marching."

And so they marched: through brush and briar and babbling brook; past oaks and firs and trees with leaves that rippled in the wind like an orgy of grasshoppers; from hot, dusty roads to damp, misty woods; stepping over toads and trampling acorns underfoot; ducking under the cobwebs, rustling through the juniper and squelching through the mud, they marched. They marched through the smell of cold clay and rotting logs; they marched as insects scattered beneath their feet and sticks cracked under their heels.

Conversation was noticeably absent along the way, supplanted by peaceful silence and personal meditation. Occasionally, Cait would stick his head out from Cloud's bag to make some throwaway wisecrack, although the mechanical cat soon gave up this practice when it became glaringly apparent that his fleshy comrades were more than willing to ignore him for the remainder of the trip.

Upon emerging from the thick of the wood, our heroes found themselves faced with the day's first unobstructed view of the legendary Mount Nibel. The mountain appeared in the same way that the moon ‒ or any other incomprehensibly large object, for that matter ‒ appears during daylight: as a shape of absolute flatness, fading into the blue yonder like a half-developed Polaroid picture of itself.

For Cloud, being in the presence of these billion-year-old frost-tipped giants lent a certain sense of scale to the task at hand. The journey that began as a few fearful whispers in a stuffy hospital room had now brought him and his teammates quite literally before the top of the world. It reminded him of the old days: a guild traveling the Planet on foot, toward some vague and foreboding purpose. Heck, who knows, maybe the old days never ended to begin with. Maybe they'd just been sleeping these past two years…

Maybe that wasn't necessarily a good thing…

The sun was rapidly falling west. Cloud looked up at the mountains again and shuddered as he thought of the town waiting on the other side.


	17. Fireside Chat

When the last vestiges of sunlight slip from the world's edge and shade usurps the land, the austere people of Rocket Town set aside the tools of their trade and take to the hearth as uniformly and efficiently as the very work from which they retire. During this time, when the streets are empty and time seems frozen in a crystalline calm, one man has made the habit of walking his dog.

As always, retired architect Glenn Klupsak and miniature poodle Sappho went out for their nocturnal promenade at eight o'clock on the dot, with Glenn carrying exactly three plastic bags in his lower left coat pocket, _just in case_. Happy homes lit their path with the smoky saffron glow of their hearths, and every window appeared as a tableau of domestic bliss hanging in the chilly night. From Mr. Klupsak's perspective, it was nothing less than a garden-variety Eden.

But it wasn't always house-shaped mailboxes and rooster weather vanes here in Rocket Town. As the oddly topical name suggests, there was in fact no town prior to the rocket; before that it was a Shinra missile base that never saw completion, with construction beginning in the final months of the Wutai War. But rather than discard such a large investment with their reputation as a weapons manufacturer, the ever-expanding Shinra Electric Power Company found that they could have their cake and eat it too by continuing to develop rocket-propelled projectiles so long as they did it with the noble cause of putting a man on the moon as their excuse. Naturally, this unprecedented feat posed its fair share of unprecedented challenges; in particular, the assembly of an unprecedented team of scientists and engineers willing to relocate to the middle of nowhere. Knowing that the best minds in the field would balk at the prospect of having to separate from their families for several years to go live in some barracks, Shinra thought outside the box and resolved on a bold move: rather than moving the launch facility to a more populated area, they concluded that it would be more cost-effective to build a whole new community around the launch facility instead. And so Rocket Town was born.

Mr. Klupsak recalled it well; after all, it was he whom Shinra chose to design the supplementary suburb for their launch base. Who else could have produced such fine work? For Glenn, the rocket town wasn't just another job; it was his manifesto, his swan song, one last stand against the follies of an increasingly urban world. In this town there would be no overcrowded streets, no dirty ghettos, none of those newfangled yuppie hutches made out of tin foil… no sir, nothing here but the chastened cottage and humble bungalow, as only honest-to-goodness Craftsman architecture can provide!

So taking Sappho out for her nightly walk was really just an excuse for Mr. Klupsak to rest on his laurels. And why shouldn't he? With that rusty old eyesore of a rocket gone for good, after all these years, he was finally able enjoy his chef-de-oeuvre in all its unblemished glory. So every night he would sneak out to admire his handiwork, come home to warm glass of milk, and fall asleep by the fire with a good book. Then, twenty-three and a half hours later, it would happen all over again, every night the same as the last. What a comforting thought this was! For in Glenn Klupsak's flawlessly symmetrical brain, life wasn't any different from a well-designed house, in which perfection is achieved by way of a straight line between two points. To deviate from this projected curve meant absolute disaster, resulting in one of the most vile and unbearable things in all existence: _randomness._

Mr. Klupsak therefore became quite unhappy that evening when Sappho launched into a spontaneous fit of barking halfway through their walk. No sooner had they turned back onto the main road than she began a great fuss of yapping, yelping, tugging and whining – all the while ignoring her master's verbal commands. This irritated Glenn to no end: to think that now -- after all those hours spent in training, after all that money and effort invested in eliminating these wayward behaviors from her nature – how after all that, at this random moment, the disobedient bitch had chosen to regress!

He pulled back on the leash until she began to strangle. "Hush, girl! What's gotten into you? There's nothing here but you and– "

Mr. Klupsak felt his perfectly symmetrical brain nearly explode as he saw what appeared to be a sasquatch made out of cotton candy bouncing straight toward him.

"_Good evening,"_ the creature said in a distinctly human voice. _"Don't be alarmed, I'm looking for– "_

Mr. Klupsak let out a shrill scream, grabbed Sappho by the collar, and ran off in the opposite direction.

"_Sheesh,"_ Reeve muttered, _"it 'aint easy being pink…"_

And so Mr. Tuesti continued on with his business, careful not to cross paths with any more excitable pedestrians. A little ways further down the road his journey came to its proper conclusion, at a familiar residence on the northern edge of town. He sauntered up to the door like a trick-or-treater lacking only a sack of sweets, issued a few muffled knocks (after several failed attempts to impress the doorbell button without any fingers) and waited eagerly for a mousy woman in coke bottle glasses to receive him.

"Oh!" Shera exclaimed upon opening the door. "Um… this is a surprise."

"_Didn't you get my message?"_

"Yes, but I was expecting… well, you."

"_Hmm. I guess I should have mentioned that my fuzzy friend here would be coming on my behalf."_

The moogle stepped inside and extended a cordial paw.

"Hello there, ah…"

"_He doesn't have a name," _said Reeve,_ "but if you address me, he'll react to your conversation as if you were talking to him. He's an AI-augmented avatar… my own invention." _

"I see… that's quite ingenious, actually."

"_Why thank you, my dear._ _You have no idea how gratifying it is to hear those words from an accomplished rocket scientist!"_

The moogle puffed its chest proudly.

"_That being said, I'm sorry I can't be here in the flesh… I'm afraid it's a bit worse for the wear at the moment."_

"Oh yes, of course! I was so worried about you, when I heard the news about the assassination attempt, and– oh, how stupid of me, expecting you here in person, after all that! Come, you poor thing, sit down and make yourself at home! I'll put on some tea and– oh no, what am I saying? Tea for a robot?" Shera tittered wearily, pushing up her glasses and kneading the crescents under her eyes. "Forgive me, I haven't been able to get my thoughts in order these past few days."

"_That's quite alright," _Reeve assured her, _"some tea would be, um… aesthetically pleasing."_

Conversation resumed in the kitchen over a hot pot of Earl Grey. Despite the immediate physical challenges involved, Reeve insisted on taking a cup for his avatar: nothing so trite as the lack of functioning digestive system was going prevent Reeve Tuesti from being a gracious guest!

His hostess was just as happy to oblige.

"So," she began, pouring him a cup, "what's it like to, ah… you know…"

"_Huh?"_

The fair woman's complexion became a bashful shade of red. "Ah, I've always wondered what it feels like… to get shot."

"_It feels like hot lead ripping though your flesh. I wouldn't recommend it."_

"Oh… yes, of course. "

A few timely sips covered up the awkward pause that followed.

"So, uh, anyway, I've been reading all the literature you send here. Did you get my donation?"

"_No!" _Reeve exclaimed happily. _"I mean, yes, my treasurer never misses a check – but no, I had no idea that you were… wow!" _

The moogle bounced up and down with analogous elation, threatening to spill its tea_. _

"_This is wonderful! To have the support of an established scientist such as yourself… it's simply invaluable to the WRO! Tell me, would you ever consider writing for the newsletter?"_

"Hmm, I'm sure The Captain would get a kick out of that."

The moogle's bouncing ceased.

"_Uh, yeah… about Cid… I was sort of hoping to speak with him… within the next nine hours, if possible."_

"Well then," said Shera, "I guess we'll just have to wait and see if he returns from his little vacation by then."

"_I assumed you of all people would know when he's coming back."_

"Not… not exactly..." The soft-spoken woman's voice began to seize up.

"_Shera, please, tell me what's going on."_

"I… well I made him leave…"

"_What?"_

"I told him not to come back… not until he started making better choices… and I just don't know if he will… if he's really capable of ch-changing…" She huddled over her mug, hiding her tears in glasses fogged with steam.

"_I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset you…"_

"I don't even know why I'm telling you all this," she groaned. "Look at me, talking to a stuffed animal, pouring it tea… it's like I'm five years old again!"

"_I understand."_ Reeve raised his avatar to its feet_. "I don't have to be here if it makes you uncomfortable." _

"W-wait, don't go!" Shera sprang up from her chair and tripped, tumbling after the moogle.

Reeve caught her in the machine's arms.

"Please don't go," she whispered, burying her tear-streaked face in the doll's fuzzy shoulder. "S-sometimes even adults need a plushie to hug…"

The moogle stroked her hair reassuringly.

"_Okay then."_

_._

_._

_._

Somewhere dark and still, billions of transistors are suddenly spurred into motion, chattering and going about their work like giddy little elves tinkering in Santa's workshop. A rag doll draws itself erect. Cait Sith comes to life once more.

The first thing he noticed was the sound of the sea. The velveteen automaton crawled out from under a pile of packs and provisions and found himself on a campground a few miles outside Mount Nibel, not far from the coast.

Cloud was sitting by the fire with his buster sword and a sharpening steel, working methodically at the blade in silence.

Red XIII was crouched down on the ground, licking his paws out of boredom.

Vincent was…well, being Vincent

Cait greeted them with a cheery yodel: "Hello-ooooooh! I'm not interrupting anything am I?"

"No," Cloud answered tersely, keeping his eyes trained on his work. "Got any news for us?

"Well, the big guy's over at Rocket Town right now. Cid's not back yet, but… something's definitely going on over there."

"Yeah, like what?"

"Can't say for sure until flyboy shows up. But I can tell you this much: it's important."

"Oh?" Red XIII shot an accusatory glance at Cait. "And by that do you mean 'important' to this mission, or important to yourself?"

"Cut that out," Cloud scolded. "Reeve is a crucial part of this team. Whatever concerns him automatically concerns the mission."

"That's kind of the problem," muttered Red.

"Don't listen to him, Reeve. Stay in Rocket Town as long as you think you should. We don't need any extra muscle." Cloud hefted the buster sword and ran a gloved finger over its newly honed edge. "Leave that to us. Your job is collecting information."

Cait shrugged. "Okay, I can do that."

"You can start by reporting on the situation back in Midgar."

"Hmmm, let's see… Tifa stopped by the hospital earlier today. Wanted to know how things are going. She tried not to show it, but she's worried sick about you."

"Yeah..." Cloud's expression softened. "She has a good heart."

"And what about the political situation?" Red XIII growled impatiently.

"Uh, yeah that…" The toy cat began wringing its tail nervously. "So, erm, I guess tit doesn't look like Ibsen is going to be recovering from the Karl Brennt fiasco…"

"You're not serious!"

"Well, yeah… considering what the scandal has done to their reputation, along with the two refineries they've lost this year… and seeing how young the company still is…" Cait lowered his bobbling head despondently. "Yeah, it's pretty safe to say Shinra doesn't have any more competition to worry about. Get ready for the second Mako age."

A volatile silence swept over the campground. Breaths grew heavier, filtered through gritted teeth. Occasionally there was the gagging sound of words failing in the throat. Hands and faces twitched.

"Unbelievable," Red XIII was the first to utter. "One would think these people had their fill of Shinra and Mako by now!"

Vincent echoed the sentiment with an irritated grunt. "Hrm… it seems that man is hopelessly infatuated with his own destruction."

"Hang on a second, you guys! What are you saying?" Lacking a soapbox, Cait Sith jumped on Red XIII's back (much to the beast's chagrin) to voice his contention. "Listen, I know it looks grim, but we can't lose faith in the people! The moment we do that, we lose everything!"

Cloud kept silent and stared into the campfire.

"Cloud, don't you have anything to say about this?"

Tifa said something interesting once:

_"Bonfires are funny, aren't they? They make you remember all sorts of things." _

They certainly do.

Seven years ago… hollow green eyes project pure hatred through the flames… people are screaming, begging for death… he turns around and walks away…

Two years ago… sitting around the Cosmo Candle, the eternal flame of Nanaki's tribe… Tifa comments on how "bonfires are funny."

One year ago…

"Cloud, are you listening to me?"

"Huh?"

He looked up and saw Red XIII frowning at him in disapproval.

"Oh. Sorry, Red, it's just this fire… it had me remembering some things."

"This fire has burned for hundreds of years," the beast replied unsympathetically. "It holds many memories, a very small fraction of which belong to you."

Cloud descended from the Candle's rocky pedestal and patted the dry earth from his slacks. "You're a real crank, you know that?"

"If I come off that way, it's because I've been frustrated with your lack of effort. To be perfectly candid, sometimes I wonder if you deserve to wear that symbol around your neck at all."

Shamed by these words, Cloud tucked the Bawaajige Nagwaagan into the recesses of shirt. "Sorry," he murmured, "I'll try to pay closer attention from now on."

"Let's just get back to the lesson, shall we?"

Cloud agreed.

"Right. Now, as I was saying: the Planet seems well on its way to recovery since the end of the Mako Age. Within just ten months, the wastelands of Midgar have already shrunk by a tenth of a percent. Moreover– "

"Do you ever worry they might bring Mako back?"

"Eh…" Red XIII cocked his head to approximate the shrug of human shoulders. "It's highly unlikely."

"But what if they did? How would that affect things?"

"The Planet would suffer just as it did the first time. Air pollution would worsen, various species would dwindle, and– "

"And when the Lifestream gets processed into Mako," continued Cloud, "what happens to the souls in it? Do they get filtered out, or is it possible…" A twinge of fear crept into his voice. "Is it possible that someone I once knew could one day be burned up in a reactor?"

"Someone you once knew?" Red XIII looked at his student with an authoritative frown. "If you did your reading, you'd know that a soul in the Lifestream doesn't belong to any one individual. Our souls have left and returned to the Planet many times, lived as many things…"

"But besides that… there has to be something _we_ get to keep, right? I mean, if I can't remember any past lives…" Cloud paused; an awesome terror suddenly flashed through his soul. "Red! What happens to our memories when we die!?"

"Isn't it obvious? They're broken down and recycled with everything else."

Cloud reeled backwards. Suddenly it felt as if all his body were trying to swallow itself. His throat constricted. His head was swimming. His eyes were burning.

_Broken down… recycled… digested… turned to shit._

"No…" He fell on his hands and knees, raking his fingers through the brittle dirt until they bled. "No!"

"Get a hold of yourself!" barked Red XIII. He bit down on the nape of Cloud's collar and pulled him upright, as a mother takes hold of her cub. "What's gotten into you?"

"You... lied to me…"

"I did no such thing!"

"Yes, you did. You told me death's not the end…"

"And so it's not!"

"No," Cloud croaked in despair, "not the end for the Planet's energy, but the end for us. Don't you get it? We can't remain ourselves if we can't remember who we are!"

_"Here we go again..." _Red seemed to say with his and lofty and impatient sigh. "When are you going to realize that the self is more than just an ego? The soul does not fear death as the ego does. The soul knows that everything is reciprocal, connected…"

"Why should it matter if we use Mako then?" Cloud shot back vehemently. "When we burn it, doesn't it just convert to energy that returns to the Planet like everything else? I mean, if it really is all 'connected!'"

"That's… that's not how it works..."

"And you'd know, right?" Cloud snarled and kicked a dash of orange cinder into the fire. "I was there! I was the one who had to fight Sephiroth at the source! And when I beat him, you know what I found there? I saw someone, someone I knew… exactly what you're saying is impossible!"

"Your imagination. A hallucination derived from your memories, nothing more."

"And what if it was? Our minds and souls both come from the Planet, don't they? My memories of Aeris should be made from the same stuff she is."

"Reality and the way we remember it are two different things," murmured Red XIII, a tender sadness coming over him. "I learned that the hard way when we found my father's resting place last year."

"This is nothing like that," said Cloud. "What I remember was real! I was in the Lifestream and I saw her reach out to me… I heard an answer from the Planet, and I knew then that I could meet her there…"

"There?"

"The Promised Land."

"For pity's sake," Red XIII suddenly cried out. "Let me help you! I'll show you to the Promised Land, we're living in the Promised Land right now! I can teach you to see it! This Planet is the only paradise we need, you only have to receive it in your heart! We can lift the veil from your eyes and you will see Aeris again! You will see that she's here with us now, along with everyone who has ever lived!"

"You just don't get it…" Cloud stepped out to the edge of the village and faced the open canyon. "I don't want everyone, I WANT HER!"

His shameless scream rang across the valley, echoing in vain. The chasm was hollow and empty; it had no answers, it only threw his words back at him, mocking his impotent rage with its eternal tranquility.

Cloud looked down into the gorge and imagined what sort of sound his body would make, shattering on the rocks below.

A brief crunch maybe, and then the tranquility would resume.

All his life and everyone in it, all its tragedies and triumphs, his most precious moments… they were all snowflakes: beautiful, unrepeatable, and disposable by the trillions.

He was alone in the Universe.

"Cloud?"

He turned around and saw Red XIII hovering behind him.

"What do you want?"

"Cloud, I… I think it would be best if… ah…" Red took a long breath and dipped his head resignedly. "What I'm saying is… I don't think I can be your teacher anymore. I'm sorry, Cloud, I just don't know … I don't know how to make you see..."

"Stop, you're breakin' my heart."

"Please, remember that you are still always welcome in this village."

Cloud tore the Bagawe Nagwaagan from his neck and threw it to the ground. "Don't bother…"

And thenhe would turn his back on the eternal flame of Cosmo Canyon forever…

"Hey!"

Cloud opened his eyes and saw another flame.

"Knock, knock! Anyone home?" Cait Sith tapped the ex-Soldier's noggin like a TV set getting a bad picture.

"Real funny, Reeve." He swatted the puppet from his shoulder. "I was just recalling something. Something about fires makes you think back…" He turned to his former mentor. "Red? Can I ask you a question?"

"Hm?"

"I want to know… is there really a difference between the soul and the ego?"

"That's it," muttered Cait, "I'm going to bed."

Red XIII looked at Cloud through the flames with a quizzical expression. "Why are you asking me now?"

"Why not?"

Cait crawled back into his bag and went into sleep mode, signified by a cartoonish display of up-tempo snoring.

"Very well," Red agreed reluctantly. He took a deep breath and began. "Think of it like this: the ego believes that when your life ends, everything else ends with it. The soul, however, knows that life goes on after death.

"This," he continued, "is why spiritually impoverished individuals like the Shinra hoard as much as they can within a single lifetime – because nothing else exists outside their narrow solipsistic worldview. Those who achieve spiritual enlightenment, on the other hand, banish this greed from their hearts and thus come to accept the eternal transience of things."

"So is there any room in there for devotion?" Cloud questioned. "Or is love just another act of greed?"

Vincent grumbled something to the affirmative.

Red XIII insisted that one could love selflessly, "provided that one is willing to let go."

Cloud was quick to renounce this addendum: "Let go? Just like that? Are we supposed abandon everything we hold dear, just because some random lottery says its time? Is that what you're saying?"

"What I'm saying," growled Red, "is that one should take joy not in the possession of things, but in their being."

"And that means?"

"It means that you don't have to cling to something in order to care about it!" Red rapped out impatiently. "It means that when you get wrapped up in having something to yourself, you lose sight of what actually makes that thing important! What is it going to take to make you realize this?"

"You see, Red, that's your problem."

"Excuse me?"

"Your attitude toward learning, it stinks." Cloud became emboldened as he spoke, looking across the fire with a calm defiance in his eyes. "You shouldn't be trying to 'make' me or anybody else realize anything. Even if you do have all the answers, you can't just go around shoving them down people's throats!"

"You don't understand… with Grandfather's passing, I've inherited the responsibility of spreading his teachings…"

"I don't remember Bugenhagen teaching people by telling them what to think," Cloud retorted. "You know, he could have saved us a lot of trouble if he skipped all that business with the cave and just told you the truth about Seto – but he didn't. Why do you think he sent us down there to risk our lives, fighting through all the poison spiders and molten lava and who knows what else? Just for the hell of it? Hell no! He did it because we have to find our way through the dark and discover the truth for ourselves. He knew that a good teacher only shows his student the entrance to the cave!"

Nanaki thought back on their journey through the Gi cave and felt his heart grow heavy. In his mind he could hear his father's crystal teardrops, dripping from granite eyes and bouncing off the stones below. He could feel that mournful howl gripping his throat, tilting his head back, toward the moon.

He looked up and saw the exact same moon floating over Mount Nibel.

"Cloud..." Red XIII looked upon his former student with a bittersweet sense of pride. "I think you know where the cave is."

"Red?"

He nodded encouragingly. "I'll be behind you the whole way."

"Then I didn't bring this along for nothing," Cloud said, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a small round object.

It was a talisman of sorts, a woven hoop of willow and string. Some of the decorative feathers were frayed. Others were broken. Many of the beads had fallen off.

But it was still there.

"The Bawaajige Nagwaagan!" Red's eye lit up with amazement. "You had it with you this whole time?"

"Yeah," Cloud murmured in realization, a smile beginning to form in his voice. "I guess I did."


	18. Teenage Wutai Ninja, Turtle's Paradise

Wutai is a curious country. Whether it's the talking bamboo forests of the South or the master noodlesmiths of the North, there's always a sight somewhere to behold. But when it comes to sheer spectacle, perhaps nothing in the land can top its own capital, Wutai City.

The city's constitution is triangular in nature, consisting of three distinct elements: the ancient, characterized by its grander monuments and ceremonies; the plebian, characterized by the bricolage fixtures of modern survival; and finally, the tourist element, a wholly contrived experience designed to contain the former two within a linear framework for the average, unadventurous vacationer.

This artificial division of sects makes for such an interesting cross-section of the city: on one side of the river you'll find coolies in conical hats balancing baskets on yokes over their shoulders, while on the other side white-gloved bellhops push suitcases on polished brass carts. On one side you'll find wet-markets full of clattering crabs and noosed roast ducks practically spilling out onto the street; on the other side you'll find imported fast food chains for the "discriminating" Eastern palate. On one side you'll find old men sitting in back alleys on pink and yellow plastic chairs, smoking their kiseru and casually bickering as sums of no consequence change hands with the fall of a mah-jongg tile; on the other side… well, hopefully you get the picture.

How did this happen? How did a country so recently locked in bitter conflict with Shinra's multinational conglomerate see its reputation shift from the "occidental menace" of the free world to its most popular tourist destination seemingly overnight? Certainly, at first glance, such a dramatic transformation would appear outlandish, even paradoxical to the observer accustomed to judging everything as through a microscope; yet examine these developments under the broader lens of human nature and suddenly it makes perfect and regrettable sense. We know the wicked impulse that compels people to look upon a defeated and demoralized enemy as entertainment; we have seen how easily the tiger that strikes mortal terror among men in its natural habitat can become the object of a peanut gallery's jeering fascination at the circus.

That tiger is Wutai: strength rendered impotent, elegance deprived of dignity; a once proud and noble warrior reduced to an exotic novelty, forced to jump through hoops for the amusement of the hand that feeds it.

Because at the end of the day, tourism, like the circus, is an industry, and industry demands that patrons have their expectations met -- even if those expectations are more grounded in fantasy than reality. The majority of locals who depend on tourism for their livelihood therefore find themselves compelled to live up to the various myths, stereotypes, and misinformed preconceptions that shape their image abroad. They assume the appearance of caricatures, flattering the ignorance of their guests rather than educating them because the fanny-pack wearing public doesn't like to be proven wrong. True, there are genuine facts liberally sprinkled throughout the guidebooks and informational placards, but nothing in the tourist experience itself is genuine. Instead the tourists get what they want: a culture commodified and sold as a gimmick. Blades once considered sacrosanct are made into low quality replicas to be fobbed off with other cheap bootleg merchandise; a fifteen-hundred-year-old jade carving of the Leviathan at the museum will receive less attention than its refrigerator magnet counterpart available at the gift shop, and so on.

It's a tricky line to walk, no question about it. Having to accommodate multiple agendas competing for narrative ownership has left the social fabric of Wutai stretched out at the seams. But even so, there still must be a common ground somewhere in this fissured cultural landscape – some universally appealing fixture, however trivial, without the gimmicky pretense of a tourist attraction or the inaccessibility of a local haunt – a place where the disgruntled tour guide might deign to brush elbows with the photo-snapping foreigner – where the coolie and the yuppie can both find some staple of happiness unqualified by circumstance…

That place is the Turtle's Paradise, the world-famous pub which for almost ten years now has provided sweet and sour succor for anyone seeking a little respite from the human condition. Celebrated for its unrivaled cocktails, the pub is able to combine more than ingredients with its mixed drinks: like those watering holes in the savanna to which a veritable ark of species will flock out of mutual thirst, the _Paradise_'s monopoly on mixology grants it the unique ability to bring people from all walks of life under one roof.

All kinds of people.

.

.

This is where tonight's episode begins: it's Friday evening and downtown Wutai has begun its nightly transformation into party central. With the sweep of a minute hand, the mild-mannered shopping district has become a howling creature of color and commotion, a giant flashing pinball machine in which people are bounced from vice to vice by forces beyond their control.

Inside the Turtle's Paradise, The Yellow Materia Orchestra (Y.M.O.) is finishing up its occidental exotica electropop act before the swinger crowd arrives to rowdy up the joint. While the balding, hachimaki-clad bassist diligently slaps his fiddle as if the honor of his ancestors were depending on it, the keyboardist lays down blue-tinged chords and preprogrammed beats on his 32-bit synthesizer, setting a misty foundation for the clarion tenor of the ehru player, who captivates the tourists and old timers with traditional pentatonic melodies conveyed in broad, serene swoops – a style completely alien to the manic, dithering violinists of the East.

Alone in the back of the room a girl sits at the bar, her stout-colored hair twirled in a bun around a pair of pearl-tipped chopsticks.

"Is everything to your liking, my lady?"

She downs a hot cup of sake and winks. "Just keep 'em coming, Earl."

"As you wish, my lady."

"You can talk to me like a real person, it's not like my dad's watching or anything."

"As you wish, my– erm, Yuffie."

A few words on Yuffie Kisaragi:

She has been called many things: lady, princess, debutante, tomboy, spoiled brat, bitch… one way or another they all reflect some aspect of truth.

As the only child of Wutai's reigning monarch, Yuffie was spared the life of pampering and restraint traditionally prescribed to daughters of Wutai royalty; instead she was bred for governance, provided with the curriculum of a prince: martial arts, poetry, calligraphy, political coercion, and -- at great pains by rote -- the protocols of statesmanship, to name a few.

Having thus been pardoned from the patriarchy's pruning shears, Yuffie has predictably bloomed into a wild, irrepressible flower. Her ninja training allows her to be invisible whenever she chooses, which is to say almost never. She leads with her chin and thinks on her feet, and whatever sounds she does abstain from in those rare moments of stealth are quickly paid back in double by a mouth big enough to make even the stone figures of Da Chao lose their cool, as Cloud and company quickly learned when their quest to save the Planet overlapped with the orb-obsessed ambitions of a certain "mystery ninja."

But now, with no more materia to plunder, no more bad guys to pummel, and no more teammates to pester, Wutai's prodigal daughter now found her previously well-fed amusement quickly running out of ways to sustain itself.

"Here's to another lousy Friday night," she groused, gulping down her third helping of sake straight from the bottle.

She felt a slender hand alight on her shoulder.

"Hey kiddo, mind if I join you?"

It was Elena (formerly) of the Turks, although the suddenness of her appearance (coupled with a black cocktail dress in lieu of her trademark pantsuit) had initially forestalled Yuffie's identification of this mysterious blonde woman now at her side. Indeed, in more ways than one, she had shown up out of the blue.

Alcohol, however, has a way of oscillating one's categorical perceptions of the ordinary and the unusual, dulling in some their natural capacity for surprise and suspicion. Thus afflicted, it was with extraordinary resignation and nonchalance that Yuffie now regarded the unexplained arrival of her erstwhile enemy-by-circumstance, greeting her upon recognition with a drunken shrug and grumbling:

"Well, I guess it's about that time again… you and your buddies here for vacation?"

"No, just me, I'm afraid."

"Same here..."

Elena pouted affectedly. "Tsk-tsk. Pretty girls like you shouldn't be going to bars alone. What if someone tried to take advantage of you?"

"Ha!" Yuffie sprang from her stool, swooning as her tipsy feet reunited with the ground. "I wish they would! I haven't had the chance to kick someone's ass in forever!" She cut the air with a few flaccid punches, fancying each swipe a felling blow on the chin of some generic scar-and-eye-patch picture show thug. After indulging in a few more seconds of pugnacious wish fulfillment, she elected to finish off the last of her imaginary assailants with a triumphant spinning uppercut – only to spin off balance and topple ass-backwards.

Elena caught her before she hit the floor. "Even ninja princesses have their limits," she admonished, setting the drunken boxer upright.

It was upon arranging the young lady's posture into a more respectable form that Elena noticed a striking band of blue exposed between the disturbed straps of her olive green tank top. Slithering, shimmering, at once resplendent and monstrous, the sinuous shape swam effortlessly beneath the sheen of Yuffie's skin, swelling and sinking with the rise and fall of every contour as it descended from the peak of her shoulder and into the valley of her lower back, tapering to a conclusion somewhere in the khaki recesses of her shorts.

Elena smiled faintly. "Hot tattoo–"

"_Irezumi_. There's a difference."

"As you wish. So why do I feel like I've seen this somewhere before?"

Yuffie pointed to a scroll bearing the likeness of Leviathan hanging above the bar.

"Aha…" Elena's face lit up with vicarious mischief. "Iconoclasm at its finest. I'll bet the old man was thrilled."

"That's one way of putting it," murmured Yuffie. "When he found out, he had the artist branded a traitor."

"Uh-huh."

"Literally."

"Oh."

"Poor guy couldn't sit down for weeks." Yuffie slumped forward, reflecting over the bottom of an empty glass. "The thing about my dad is… I mean, me and him are basically doing the same thing, you know? Whatever it takes to get our kicks. I'm not as bad as he is, but then maybe by the time I've been here fifty years I'll have to resort to caning shoplifters too." She took another swig from her bottle, swallowing its fermented contents with a bitter sigh. "That's why this country's so screwed up, you know… everybody's bored as hell."

"Things certainly aren't as exciting as they used to be," Elena replied coolly, sparking a cigarette she'd gleaned from her purse while listening. "Take the last time we were in this town together: you, me… _the Don_…"

"Yeah, right…" Yuffie's voice wavered with queasy sarcasm. "That'll make a nice bedtime story to tell the kids: _'did mommy ever tell you about the time she almost got raped?_''"

"Mm. Such a taboo subject… and yet so fascinating."

"What're you talking about?"

"Rape," the former Turk exhaled, wrapping the word in smoke.

"You're crazy. "

"Is that it? And here I thought you were into that sort of thing."

"What!?"

"Rape." Elena rested chin on her hands and grinned impertinently. "Derived from the noun _raptus:_ theft, seizure, etc."

Yuffie scowled. "Real funny,"

"Speaking of theft, what ever happened to all that booty you scored from your treasure hunting days? Still have that lovely materia collection?"

"Maybe I do, maybe I don't."

"Yes, of course… how rude of me! I should know better than to ask a lady like yourself about such things."

"Yeah, sorta like rape: you know, just one of 'those things…'"

"Oh, you!" Elena laughed with the simpering levity of a coquette, carelessly dropping her cigarette on the floor. "Come on, let's have a drink together! I'm buying."

"Unh, okay…"

Having obtained Yuffie's reluctant consent, Elena placed an order with the bartender.

"You'll love this," she said. "Me and the guys used to get it every time we came here."

"Just like the guys... great."

Meanwhile, Elena's forgotten cigarette continued to smolder beneath their feet, its voracious cherry swallowing more and more of the tobacco buffer separating it from a pocket of flash powder stored in the butt.

And then, several minutes later, there arrived two oversized martini glasses filled with blue libation and adorned with tortoiseshell swizzle sticks.

Yuffie chortled through her nostrils. "Curacao Carapaces? Really?"

"Well, it _is_ the signature drink here."

"I know but…." Yuffie lapsed back into laughter as she tried to picture the stern faces of Reno and Rude presiding over such a _flamboyant _beverage.

"Now then, what should we drink to?"

"Whatever you want--"

A loud popping noise thrilled the air.

"What the!" After nearly starting from her stool, Yuffie leaned under the bar to investigate what she thought had been a firecracker set off at her feet.

In the meantime Elena was left to amuse herself with nothing but two cocktails and her own devices.

After a brief and fruitless survey of the floor, Yuffie sat back up none the wiser. "Huh… wonder what that was?"

"Sound and fury, my dear," Elena replied, raising her glass. "To good health."

.

An hour later, Yuffie was feeling rather ill. Too much to drink, she thought: that sugary blue drivel had put her past the limit. The change of scenery certainly didn't help either: the Y.M.O. had since finished its set and relinquished the stage to a local DJ, the sheer volume of which, combined with the increased traffic of swingers and club-goers, had effectively morphed the chatty pub into a tightly-packed discotheque.

Elena, noting the absence of color from Yuffie's cheeks, asked her if something was wrong.

"I dunno," she replied, "I just feel sort of**--" **Her gag reflex finished the answer for her.

"I'd better get you home."

"You?"

Yuffie searched her environment for a mental anchor, something – anything – to focus on long enough to get her head together, a point of reference with which she might be able to recalibrate her judgment in this moral house of mirrors.

No such luck. It was all too loud, too flashy, too fast. Her eyes instinctively staggered across the faces of strangers in the darker folds of the crowd, finding in every one of them the same gaping, overwrought expression of hilarity. It disgusted her to no end. Although the canons of polite society demand that laughter is innocent until proven guilty, at that moment Yuffie saw with startling clarity the essential perversity underneath it all, the strained desperation – for what is laughter but a scantily clad amelioration of the bare-toothed snarl of primal aggression? Just as major and minor musical scales are discriminated only by their respective tonics, the faces of innocent joy and predatory glee are separate only in theory. To obscure the qualifying modality with neutralizing agents such as alcohol, loud music, large crowds, and darkened rooms is to throw the character of everything into a state of freefall, which one might say is exactly why people enjoy such gatherings.

The high is only enjoyable until you look down, however.

Yuffie was now stricken with vertigo and growing dizzier by the minute. Her stomach was presently staging a revolt, and the room's spinning did nothing for her motion sickness. Black and green inkblots seeped into her vision; the twinkling lights of neon beer signs and paper lanterns grew more and more distant in the encroaching darkness.

"Trust me," she heard a voice say.

And then, just as the final thread in her silver cord snapped, Yuffie saw an outstretched hand reach through the abyss and catch her.

She opened her eyes and found herself once more in the safety net of Elena's arms.

"Trust me. Let me take you home."

"Fine," Yuffie croaked, disguising her vulnerability with swagger even while choking on the taste of almost-vomit. "If you insist."

.

The two women slogged their way back to Ms. Kisaragi's hideout, a studio apartment concealed beneath the bell pavilion just outside the royal pagoda – the better of two options, the other requiring Yuffie to stumble drunk through her father's house.

Once inside, Elena proved most prolific in the role of nurse, taking on an almost maternal aspect as she swaddled her patient in a white blanket and cooked up a pot of chrysanthemum tea.

"There," she exhaled with satisfaction, handing Yuffie a steaming cup of the palliative. "Isn't that better?"

"Yeah, actually."

"Now, if we only had some… ah, never mind…"

"Some what?"

"Some Heal materia. A poisona spell could take care of this in an instant, I think."

Yuffie gave it some thought, then nodded reluctantly. "The painting on the wall… there's a safe in behind it… right thirty-six, left ten, right fifty-nine, right ninety-seven."

"Great, we'll have you feeling better in no time!" Elena concealed a smirk as she went to work on the dial. "Don't worry, I know how protective you are when it comes to your materia… I promise I'll be as gentle as if it were my own."

The lock clicked open and an airbag deployed from the safe with concussive force, ramming Elena in the face. She stumbled and fell backwards, still in a daze as the steel cage hidden in ceiling dropped down on her.

"Gotchya!" Yuffie shrieked, springing from her sickbed and dashing her tea and blanket on the floor. "Time to spill the beans! What the hell's going on, huh? I know you spiked my drink with something! Talk dammit!"

Elena staggered to her feet. "Calm down, will you?"

"Calm down? You're telling _me_ to calm down, after everything you've… everyth…"

Yuffie could no longer speak. She felt an icy hand grab her by the solar plexus and crush the wind out of her. Crying a breathless cry, she doubled over and clutched her abdomen.

"Do you feel it? Do you feel him inside you?"

"H-him?"

"Yes dear, you may notice some changes in your body during this strange and magical time. Don't worry though, it's all perfectly natural… all in the genes, as they say." A devilish grin played across Elena's carmine lips. "Welcome to the family."

She then added, "now be a good girl and get me out of this thing, will you?"

Just like that, Yuffie stood up through no effort of her own and walked across the room, carried on phantom limbs the like the wire-pulled puppet of some alien impetus. She was now a captive audience to her own actions, watching in horror as her hands moved of their own accord and operated the levers inside the booby-trapped safe with full knowledge of their workings.

The trap was reset; the cage retracted into the ceiling.

Elena grabbed Yuffie by the arm and twisted it behind her. "So then," she sneered, "what do you say we take a look at that pretty little materia collection of yours?"


	19. Anima

Cloud ran though the mossy glen for hours, chasing after the sublime sensation. He followed it as though tracking a scent: not in a straight line, but in raveling threads of varying intensity, losing the trail in some places and finding it again in others. And as the meandering chase inevitably brought him closer to its source, the sensation continued to grow inside of Cloud until it nearly became him, coursing through the young man's body like the pitch in a tuning fork, tickling him down to the marrow in his teeth.

The trail ultimately brought Cloud to a damp, misty thicket. Just beyond the undergrowth he could hear music, a honey-tongued soprano ringing in harmonic sympathy with the voice of the Planet like the strings of an Aeolian harp.

With trembling hands, Cloud parted the moist folds of the brush; rays of dazzling white light bombarded his amazed vision, flooding his eyes with a pearly luster until not even his pupils retained their darkness.

And when the gleam receded, as light is known to do, back into the skins of all things visible, it rendered unto him a little creek, flowing through a glassy pool at the foot of a small waterfall. On a nearby stone there sat a pair of green shoes; on another, a fair maiden, slicing the water with her delicate feet as she wove a crown of flowers and herbs in her hair, gaily reciting bittersweet melodies she had learned from her mother.

"Aeris?"

She turned to him with smiling brown eyes. "Did you miss me?"

"More than anything," Cloud whispered, his voice stretched to a quivering thread between extremes of reverence and remorse.

"No need to get worked up," she giggled, "it's only me."

Cloud couldn't control himself any longer; the emotion tore through him like a deluge. He ran to the flower girl and hung on her knees like a fawning child.

"Stay with me," he said.

And so they left the little creek and explored the forest together. They recalled old tribulations with laughter, shared the dearest secrets about themselves, and engaged in other fanciful banter throughout the stroll. At one point in their whimsy they lay with their backs to the ground and divined shapes in the clouds.

"That one looks like you!" Aeris proclaimed, pointing to the sky. "It's a Cloud cloud!"

After surrendering several hours to their gambols and caprices, the happy pair came upon a wide clearing marked by nothing but a single walnut tree. They decided to rest there under its branches and watch the sun set.

Aeris played the Aeolian harp and sang while they sat and waited for the twilight. Fauna from all corners of the forest flocked to see the enchantress perform: green finches, blue tits, purple rabbits and yellow chocobos…

"I didn't know you could do stuff like this," Cloud remarked, amusing one of the rabbits with an egg-shaped canteen from his bindle.

"What, come back to life?"

"I mean play an instrument."

"Oh, _that_," she laughed, glancing sidelong at her harp with blushing modesty.

A young fawn still learning to walk went up to Aeris and buckled at the knees, dropping its muzzle across the pink folds of her lap.

Cloud remembered how it used to feel when he laid his head over his mother's apron while she stroked his hair.

"Aeris… I don't mean to nag or anything, but now that I think about it, it's kind of weird seeing you like this."

"What's wrong? Aren't you happy?"

"Of course, but… how I can tell if it's really you?"

"You can't."

And then she was gone. Just a pink ribbon on a cold glass altar.

"Enjoy the ride," an underpaid voice recites in monotone.

The cables are fed through the pulley and the gondola is put into motion.

Cloud is sitting across from Aeris, struggling to move. He wants to sit next to her, to hold her hand and see his reflection in her eyes… but he can't. His feet are nailed to the ground; his legs are locked together. The only movement he can make is a slight pivot from the hip, left or right.

Because those are the only movements he ever made back then. Everything he says and does in this moment is already said and done, written in the indelible ink of history two years ago. He's already made the choice to give into his doubts and fears and sit squarely on the other side of the car with his back stiff, his eyes distant, and his arms impatiently crossed. Struggle as he might now against the omnipotent tow of the past, for all his strain and yearning he'll always be confined to those same two motions, left or right.

This was his choice. Back then he chose to hide his heart in shame and defer once more to the defense mechanisms incumbent in his mind, that embellished persona cast in the warped image of a masculine ideal derived from experiences in SOLDIER. For whatever reason, Cloud had come away from those years with the distinct impression that it is weak and unattractive for a man to appear as anything other than consistently pissed off – an odd notion, considering that his closest peer and greatest role-model during this time was Zack Fair, a notoriously cheerful and outgoing flirt.

"At first it bothered me how much you were alike," Aeris confesses, lowering her head solemnly. "The way you walk… a certain gesture…"

Maybe some gestures had come from Zack, but not this cold emotionally distant bullshit. Cloud's mask of severity must have been fashioned then after some other figure of male strength deeply impressed on his consciousness during that time…

_Him._

Cloud sees himself climb up those marble steps and prepare to execute the most horrible task imaginable. Thrash and rage as he might, his protests have no more bearing on the outcome than a moviegoer shouting at the screen. He's on a fixed track, a stationary bicycle hooked up to the battery of the doomsday device he's trying to peddle away from. Every attempt to intervene, every dissenting command issued from his will is intercepted by some overriding malignance and translated into one more step toward perdition. He tries to speak, and he draws his sword; he tries to back away, and he raises it to strike.

Cloud therefore resolves to beat the trap at its own game, giving up the struggle and ceasing all movement indefinitely – the result is every bit as predictable and unbearable as the future put on delay. Because even if he chooses to suspend the horror for all eternity, that horror will always be there, hanging in the air forever with its grim certainty unchanged. For all his fighting and stalling, in the end Cloud will always raise his blade against Aeris… and his friends will always stop him before he can bring it down on her head.

It doesn't matter. His sin isn't committed in the form of any action: it's his failure to act at all.

Six whole seconds while Sephiroth descends, and all he has to do is move her a few inches, right or left.

His feet are nailed to the ground; his legs are locked.

Five seconds now.

Aeris continues: "I think I must have seen him in you."

Cloud wants to stand up and scream. He wants to warn her, to say something that could prevent all the horrible things that will otherwise happen two days from this moment. He wants to apologize for allowing it to happen two years ago in the first place. He wants to cry out her name, to beat his brow, to fall to her side and crush a tear-stained cheek against her breast…

Instead he nods to the left.

Two seconds. Sephiroth adjusts the angle of his blade.

"But you're different… things are different."

One second.

"Cloud, I want to–"

Zero.

A shell ruptures, releasing its essence in an explosion of sound and color – brilliant, dynamic, sonorous – yet how easily, how quietly it then goes back into the night, withering as soon as it blooms, never to be experienced again…

High above the gilded techno-shroom spires of the Gold Saucer, the fireworks continue to burst and fizzle in floral, ephemeral formations. As Cloud watches the lightshow with increasing concentration, the smudged glass and rickety wood planks of the gondola begin to drift more and more out of focus, until, like a revelation, the entire cabin is gone, leaving him and Aeris suddenly standing before a glitter-torched sky with nothing but the naked night beneath their feet.

"I want to meet you," she says, a passing shower of sparks framing her head.

"I know, I've tried, I just… I lost my way. I don't where to look anymore!"

"It's simple. All you have to do is come home."

"Home? You don't mean Nibelheim!"

"Come home, Cloud."

And like that she turned around and walked away, into the increasingly glaring light.

"Wait! Don't go!" Cloud tried to run after her, but his feet found no traction in the ether. "Please!"

The flower girl stopped in her tracks and turned to face him.

Foot long nose. Facial hair. Scar over right eye.

Cloud's drowsy mind assembled these parts back into a picture of reality to reveal a snoring Red XIII curled up by the dying fire.

With a frustrated yawn, he rolled over in his sleeping bag and lay on his back. Judging by the moon, it was somewhere around four or five hours until sunrise.

He looked around at the stars. Being in the city for so long had caused him to forget the true immensity of the stars. Beneath the purple-orange electric bisque slathered over a typical Midgar night, the constellations were nothing but freckles on a suntan, a mimeograph from the bottom of the pile. But out here, so many miles divorced from anything resembling a light bulb, the sky was unabashed in showing its diamond-encrusted skin, flowing and foaming with milky filigrees like a well-creamed cup of blue coffee.

Cloud looked up at it with an instinctive longing, reaching out to the stars as though to grasp them. For a moment in his unarticulated desires he dared to hope that somewhere, up there in infinity, there might be room for a departed soul, someone to watch over him. In the protocol of human thought, however, reflection is never far from reflex, and so these nebulous fancies forged in the furnace of his heart were swiftly cooled and brought before the scrutiny of his mind, whereupon they were appraised and dismissed as baubles of false hope. By Cloud's reasoning it was a cruel joke: here was the great mystery, so plainly laid out before him and yet so many light-years away; so unthinkably massive, yet he could eclipse entire galaxies with his thumb or shift their alignment with a wink. It was an illusion, a seed of trickery planted in the bed of man's primal thoughts to yield a false sense of intimacy with the abyss. Yet behind all the religious delusions and wish fulfillment, it was overwhelmingly clear that our correspondence with the other side had never been reciprocated, not even once.

What a lonely existence it was, to always behold the entire Universe and yet never be seen back!

_Screw it, _he thought.

Cloud shed his sweaty sleeping bag and went for a walk. The crisp air acted as a cerebral palate cleanser and rinsed away the muddled emotions, the muddy residue of dream backwash.

Cloud hadn't gotten very far, however, when his attentions snagged on an uncanny shape hunkered between the trees. It looked vaguely human, huddled there. It was slumped over with a strange and familiar stiffness in which the ex-Soldier immediately recognized the posture of death.

With grim resolve and a firm stick for carcass prodding, he stepped forward to have a closer look at this corpse when suddenly it threw out a curious sound:

"Hm."

Cloud breathed a sigh of relief. "Vincent!"

By the way he sat on that tree stump one would think the man had been carved from it.

"What's that for?" he droned.

"Uh, nothing…" Cloud replied, dropping his stick on the ground. "So, ah, I guess you're having trouble sleeping too huh?"

Vincent responded with an affirmative grunt.

"Yeah, I hear that." Cloud groaned in empathy. "Still, you should try and get some rest for tomorrow."

"I have years worth of rest,"

"Huh. You've got a point there."

Five years," rasped Vincent, "for five years you slept next to me in a different chamber of the same hell. Are you ready to go back?"

"Hey, that's how I found you, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't expect a simple retread of last time," Vincent said darkly.

The sound of crickets prevailed for several minutes.

"Vincent… there's something I should tell you."

"What."

"I've been getting this funny feeling lately. It… keeps getting stronger, as we get closer to Nibelheim."

"Dread."

"Believe me, I have plenty of that too. But this is something else. I haven't felt this way since we were chasing Sephiroth."

"What do you think it means?"

"I…" Cloud felt his throat begin to tighten. "I don't want to think about it."

"I see."

"I'm not a clone. I don't feel a drive towards the Reunion, but…"

"But you still know when you're getting near. It's in your blood."

Cloud nodded solemnly. "Yeah."

"Hm. I've been getting something like that too, a feeling that keeps growing."

"Really?

"Yes." Vincent lifted a golden talon to scratch his shaggy head. "More and more I get the feeling that all life on this Planet, especially the people we know… it feels as if they're approaching total destruction."

"But how?"

"I don't know. It's only feeling. Anyway, you should probably try and get some rest for tomorrow."

"Yeah," grumbled Cloud, "sweet dreams to you too."


	20. Lost and Found

Final Fantasy VII: Full Circle

Part Three: Return of the Repressed

* * *

.

It was four in the afternoon and the sun's rays had already gone flat like cheap champagne. Lying straight on her bed, Tifa followed the ailing light with vacant eyes, staring without looking as it tickled through her window in wan, decaying shafts. When even her numbed senses began to cramp with the monotony of it all, she simply tossed her head the other way, flinging her cold-oatmeal gaze onto something else; it went splat on the wall and oozed down onto a little oak vanity that had once belonged to her mother.

There, checkered by photographs and other sentimental knick-knacks tucked into the framework of the antique mirror, she saw herself.

She hardly recognized the sluggish creature looking back at her.

Less than a week ago Tifa's life, for all its flaws, was something with which she could get by – and that's no small feat when one has two businesses and a household to consider. But so much had happened, so much shit had fallen from the sky since then that those days now seemed remote as a dream. As it went now, Tifa's life was buried in the episodic nightmare of current events, a deluge of personal and worldly crises too arcane for one person to make sense of, much less properly address. The snag was that very tissue of the problem was too delicate to be broken down into manageable chunks; any effort to do so caused the entire thing to disintegrate, to break down on a molecular level until the problem itself was reduced to an inscrutable catalog of its basic elements:

_Shinra, Mako 2, Sector One, bombing mission, oil refinery, global warming, Bone Village, Ibsen, Ghadma Liberation Front, Reeve, WRO, assassin, photograph, seven years ago, Nibelheim, Cloud, trap… _

It was like a recipe with all the ingredients and no directions; everything seemed to fit together but Tifa couldn't place the pieces. She ran through the list till the items bled together and her mind was rubbed raw; yet she found nothing like a common bond to link all the ingredients together, nothing like a central theme apart from the same dreadful feeling she had about it all.

Maybe that was the whole of it. No hidden connections, no secret ties… just a feeling, pent-up emotions sublimated into the impression of causality. Tifa considered it possible, calling to mind all the crazy superstitions and old wives' tales that had probably started along similar lines. Indeed, it a common trick played by the mind in panic: when troubles accumulate they add up like mirrors, each reflecting the other so as to seem linked in an unbroken chain of portals when in reality they sit flatly apart. Likewise, the rippling of a few tears renders our vision kaleidoscopic, causing our perceived woes to amalgamate and multiply into a terrifying chimera a hundred times the sum of its parts. It isn't until the storm passes and our tears dry up that we see the real shape of things, and then we are invariably humbled and relieved to discover that these mystical, occult creatures of our fears are constructed but from a few scattered trifles, a few loose beads at the bottom of a mirrored tube, no different than the frightened child's boogeyman exposed for a pile of miscellaneous shapes when the lights are put on.

But under the pall of these last few days, Tifa was still groping for such a light. Like that pile of shapes in the child's darkened bedroom, the contours of her anxieties were presently free to separate and coalesce at their own discretion, admitting enough permutations to resemble anything and everything the young woman had ever shuddered at. Fears past and present overlapped and knotted around her thoughts like a noose, circumscribed from her darkest memories of Nibelheim to the uncertain future currently waiting there for Cloud and the others…

Thinking of them worried her most.

_I should have gone,_ she thought.

Of all the things now plaguing Tifa, nothing tormented her more than having to stay at home and perform the regular motions like nothing was wrong. Nibelheim might be spooky, but at least over there anxiety wouldn't be abandoned to its own devices while she tended to quotidian matters – not that she'd been doing a very good job of tending to anything at this time (the Seventh Heaven hadn't opened its doors since the incident in Wall Market).

To put it more simply, Tifa's present situation gave her a firsthand appreciation for what every military wife must endure. In the last twenty-four hours she'd learned what it was like to be made to carry on while waiting for the unguaranteed return of those she cared about; to carry on unwittingly, dependant on secondhand notice for information as basic as whether her loved ones lived or died.

To put it even more simply, in the last twenty-four hours she'd learned what it was like to be Elmyra Gainsborough.

Tifa vividly recalled the last time she'd seen the woman. It was two years ago, shortly after Meteor's disintegration. She and Barret had gone to Kalm to reclaim custody of Marlene – an emotionally taxing job for both parties. To say that the transaction took place in an unpleasant context would be putting it mildly: before Avalanche came along, the Gainsboroughs had been a surrogate family of survivors, an orphan and a war widow living together in quiet harmony... but that was no longer the case now. Aeris was no longer a survivor, no longer the last of her kind. Because of Avalanche – because they would have a victim of war serve on their frontline – Aeris was now just another casualty.

That was how Tifa saw it, anyway. From her perspective, she and Barret owed Elmyra twofold: she had kept their child safe while they had done the opposite for hers. And yet they came to her now not to render reparations, but repossession, and no words of gratitude, no declamation of contrition could ever change this fact. On the contrary, such expressions only cast the disparity of the situation in stark relief, for there was something undeniably perverse about Barret and Tifa presuming to console Elmyra for the loss of her daughter while at the same time reenacting it with the subtraction of another.

Since then neither Tifa nor anyone in her association has spoken with Elymra – and who could, after something like that? Once a month Reeve will send a check to Mrs. Gainsborough at the same address in Kalm; the timely manner in which it gets cashed is the only indication that she is alive and well in the most basic sense, for what it's worth.

Tifa exhaled and felt a sharp pang of guilt stick like broken glass between her ribs.

_The things we think about when we give ourselves the time…_

Suddenly, a tiny voice called out her name.

"Marlene?" Tifa sat up keenly, the glass in her ribs melting in the present moment. "Is something wrong?"

"Yeah!" Marlene poked her head in the doorway and held up a clacking satchel. "You said you'd play marbles with me, _remember_?

"Oh, right… just give me a minute. We'll play then, I promise."

"Okay! But no longer than a minute!'

Marlene withdrew to the hallway eagerly, gripping the satchel in her pocket with glee. Like those monks in Wutai who can touch the transcendent just by revolving a pair of iron orbs in one hand, Marlene took an almost religious pleasure in handling her marbles. The sublime traction, the way they softly battered against each other in their pouch, vibrating with promise of endless collisions to come – it was better than jacks and tiddlywinks and put together!

Marlene pulled the satchel from her pocket to admire her collection some more; out the marbles came, hailing on the hardwood floor with spectacular calamity.

She looked down at the satchel and saw that she was holding it upside-down.

Darn.

The floor was a bubble or two off plumb, so the frictionless marbles gathered momentum rather quickly. From the skittering stampede Marlene managed to bag two; the rest continued until the end of the hall, where they promptly disappeared through the crack under Barret's bedroom door.

Double darn.

Knowing well that she wasn't supposed to go in there, Marlene entered her father's room warily. It was dark and strange and looked more like a garage than a place for sleeping. Sunlight brewed yellow through the skins of drawn shades, casting a homely plaque over everything look like an old picture. The floor was puddled with cast-off clothes and clutter. In the nearest corner a big red punching bag hung from the ceiling; it reminded Marlene of the one her papa used to pummel in his room under the pinball machine, back at the old house before it got smashed. It reminded her of sitting on a pile of crates, watching Biggs and Wedge drink from brown paper bags, playing cards and laughing and eating cold fried chicken, while Jessie, sitting at her computer desk with a book of crossword puzzles and a pencil behind her ear, would roll her eyes.

That was before they also got smashed.

Turning away from the punching bag now, Marlene saw a broad workbench squatting opposite. It was piled high with all sorts of neat stuff and things: old radio parts; crumpled beer cans; silver sticks of sealing wax; jugs and tubes of various adhesives, lubricants, degreasers and gums; a set of little rubber tank treads; boxes filled with screwdrivers and drill bits; a smooth, dark roll of electrical tape…

But of all these treasures dangerous and wondrous, it was a pair of bolt cutters at the bottom of the heap that fascinated Marlene the most. Even for her robust imagination it proved a trying task to suppose a reason why anyone would need such big and scary scissors; after all, the purple plastic ones that came with her crayons could cut through paper and string as well as any.

From these premises she therefore drew the same conclusion that any six-year-old logically would; namely, that these scissors existed for the sole purpose of looking cool.

"Cool!"

Trembling with excitement and trepidation, she climbed onto a nearby stool and yanked the big scary scissors free, never suspecting that they might have been preserving a greater teleological design hidden in the ostensible chaos of Barret's workbench.

That is in fact exactly what they did: before falling hostage to Marlene's prying caprice, the bolt cutters served as the main cornerstone in a carefully constructed pile of junk, which, acting as a sort of dike, served to hold up a large slab of mirror Barret kept aside for the medicine cabinet he hoped to build one day in the near future.

But make just one tiny alteration, and future events can suddenly be recalculated from the hundreds of variables that make up your ordinary pile of junk. With the bolt cutters relieved of their vital duty to serve a child's whim, the delicate balance of debris had begun to shift…

Marlene's dalliance with the big scary scissors, however, was short lived, and her attentions soon returned to the more pressing matter of her runaway marbles. After satisfying her initial curiosity, she dropped the bolt cutters back on the workbench with a loud thud.

That was the last straw; the junk pile broke into a landslide. The mirror, shaken and bereft of restraint, slowly tipped forward.

Marlene gazed up and saw her own face contort with fear as it swooped down on her.

There was a brief ruckus, commotion, and then…

Stillness.

Peeking out between her fingers, Marlene opened her eyes and saw her face once more, peeking back at her through the fingers of a grown-up.

"This is why your papa doesn't like you going in here," Tifa said calmly, still channeling the Black belt focus that had enabled her to make the catch. She set the mirror against the legs of Barret's workbench. "That could have been a trip to the emergency room right there… not to mention seven years bad luck!"

"I know I'm not supposed to play with this stuff, I just… I was just looking for my marbles, 'cause they spilled under the door and–"

Tifa knelt to Marlene's height and smiled gently. "It's okay. What matters is that nobody got hurt." Then with a wink: "Now what do you say we find those marbles?

So the woman and child went to work, sifting through the swampish floor for a few glass beads. Somewhere in all that clutter Tifa managed to misplace her angst, losing her troubles at the same rate the marbles were recovered: piece by piece. There was something profoundly comforting about it. A simple task aimed at a simple sense of completion: the marbles are lost, the marbles are found. _Fort und da_.

Things continued in this manner until eighteen of them were collected.

Then Marlene said: "We've got more than enough marbles, but the masher's still missing."

"Masher?"

"The big one you use to whack the other marbles. We can't play without it."

"Well, uh, what color is it?"

"Green."

"And you're sure you saw it roll under the door?"

"For sure!"

"Hmmm." Tifa fingered her chin as she recalled something her father would say to her whenever she'd lost something:

"Well, if you were your masher, where would you be?"

"Under the bed!"

Tifa wasn't exactly prepared to get a serious answer on that one.

"Uh…"

"It's under the bed," Marlene repeated, pointing for clarity.

"I thought I already looked under there."

"Well you didn't look hard enough, 'cause there it is!"

Supporting her weight on one elbow, Tifa arched her neck and peered into the dark cavity between the floor and the box spring. Surely enough, there at the end of the abyss was the green, faintly glimmering promise of Marlene's masher.

"Well I'll be darned…"

"Can you reach it?"

"We'll see," said Tifa, plunging shoulder-deep into the chasm.

She worked her hand diligently, navigating blindly through cardboard boxes and awkward bends. Slowly she withdrew more and more latitude to fund her reach until she could feel her triceps starting to skim the greasy dust off the floor. And then, as her arm reached its absolute extremity, she felt her fingertips just barely graze the smooth surface of round glass. She strained, shifted her position, and ground her shoulder against the bed frame to squeeze in that one last millimeter needed to tip the balance and get a purchase on the marble, but it was no use; her anatomy and immediate environment simply would not permit it.

With a sigh of defeat, Tifa let her arm fall to the floor. That's when she felt something else, something flat and fuzzy – like a sweater, only smaller – resting beneath the marble. If she could pull out the fuzzy thing, maybe she could drag the marble out with it…

She did.

And then she wished she didn't.

"That's not my masher..."

"No… it's not."

"What is it?"

"Marlene… maybe you should go to your room for a while…"

"Am I in trouble?"

"No, sweetie, you didn't do anything wrong… you didn't do anything…"

"Are we still going to play?"

"I don't think so."

.

.

Barret came home with a happy tune on his lips and a bag of goodies in his newly upgraded hand. The torsion in the wrist had been failing recently, requiring a new cylinder -- along with the standard tune-up -- from the shop downtown. On the way back he made a stop at the pharmacy to pick up a ginseng relax-tonic for Tifa and a strawberry ice milk for Marlene.

He entered through the back door and set the drinks in the kitchen.

"Hello? Anyone home?"

No answer. He made his way upstairs.

When he saw the door to his room ajar, his gut began to tighten.

When he entered the room, it imploded.

"Tifa, what are you–"

She threw the answer at his feet: a black ski mask and a green materia orb.

"They smell like smoke," she said weakly.

"Tifa, I'm sorry…"

"You… you…" She blindsided his cheek with the flat of her hand. "You idiot! What the hell were you thinking?" She slapped him again.

Barret remained silent, never flinching. His eyes were fixed forward, cast deep in hard, hurting thought.

"You could have killed someone! All those people at the refinery…"

"Not really," said Barret.

"'_Not really?"_"Tifa suppressed the urge to slap him a third time. "What the hell do you mean, 'not really?'"

"Look, I'll show you…"

He picked the materia off the floor and pointed it to a pile of oily rags slouching in the corner. Within seconds a corona of green flared up around his feet, whistling hot and shrill like a boiling kettle, and then–

**_Nyuuurrrr!_**

A vortex opened out of nothing. Dilating and then contracting, it swallowed the rags with itself until neither remained.

"Is that?"

Barret nodded tersely, dropping the orb into his pocket. "Level two Exit materia. Those guys at the refinery ended up miles away before the place went up – though it looks like Ibsen's given 'em an early bonus to leave that part of the story out."

"So what then? That's your excuse? Cast a few remove spells and suddenly it's safe to set a bomb off in the middle of town?"

"Don't be throwing stones from glass houses," Barret growled. "This line of work's nothing new for _either_ of us."

Tifa stamped on his big bread loaf of a foot. "You dink! That's just what pisses me off! You've gone backwards! We were supposed to have learned from our mistakes, you know, I thought… I thought we'd moved on from this nonsense together!"

"Yeah… I thought so too," said Barret, his tone lingering on a wistful note before hardening again. "But it turns out it ain't that simple. Truth is, we're only as good as the times let us be. Sure, we like to pretend our fight's been won, like we've entered this new age of sunshine and rainbows and using our words instead and all that, but in the end it's just the same old shit wrapped in a different package. When it comes down to it, people still wanna keep sucking stuff out of the Planet, whether its oil or mako-lite or who knows what. These people watched the Lifestream come up from the ground and save their asses from Meteor, and they're still debating whether it even exists? For crying out loud, man! How the hell am I supposed to move on when the world keeps lagging behind?"

"You've got to be patient!" Tifa clasped her hands in a forlorn appeal. "These things take time!"

"And how much time do we have until they make a decision we can't undo?" Barret retorted. "'Cause from where I'm standing, unless another Meteor falls out of the sky, this is our one and only chance to rebuild things the way they ought to be, and I for one am not gonna sit around and let it pass us by!"

He stopped and measured a long, deliberate pause through his nose.

"Yeah, so maybe I made a mistake, but at least I did something."

"Oh, so that's how it is?" Tifa felt a new wave of indignation come over her. "And I'm here doing nothing, raising Marlene while you're out blowing up the neighborhood?"

"No, that's not--"

"Pretty easy to forget about her when you're never home, isn't it?"

"Now that's just bullshit!" snapped Barret. "You think I did this because I like setting off bombs and risking lives? The only reason I do anything that I do is because I want to make the world a better place for Marlene to grow up in!"

"Well then, mission accomplished! Ibsen's going bankrupt and Shinra's about to step in and take over – isn't that swell?"

"It wasn't supposed to happen that way..."

"Reactors One and Five didn't happen the way they were supposed to either. Are you starting to seeing a pattern here?"

When he said nothing, Tifa continued: "You know, if you wanted to do some actual good, you could've joined Reeve! Signed up with the WRO, gotten something done! But no, not you and your stupid grudges! You just couldn't forgive him and move on from it, could you? That's what he did; he put his Shinra days behind him and went on to do something good for the Planet. But _you_…" Her voice turned at the word. "You're still where you were two years ago! You say the world refuses to change, but it's you who's bringing yesterday's war to our streets!"

Barret's scowl unfurled. "Tifa, I…" He sighed in defeat. "I'm sorry. I was wrong."

"That's funny, because I remember you saying something like that about two years ago. We were on the airship parked outside the crater and you got up in front of everyone and" Her words broke into an abortive sigh. "Does it even really matter anymore? Forget it. I'm done talking to you. Take what you need and leave."

"What?"

"You heard me!" She put her back to him and thrust her finger toward the door. "Get the hell out of my house!"

"You can't just… where will I go?"

"Not my problem."

"...what about Marlene?"

"She would have been better off with Dyne."

And just like that, the dejected giant's massive build seemed to collapse under its own weight. Broad shoulders sagged. Invisible tears streamed down rawhide cheeks. He opted to speak, but his voice was reduced to a burnt-out husk. So he left saying nothing.

His blocky-floppy feet made cruel sport of his exile, announcing every step in the walk of shame with a goofy refrain of _gadunk-adunk-adunk._

And Tifa found herself feeling a bit guilty as she listened to this sound, this self-afflicted Skimmington rumbling down the staircase and out the door. But then there came another, nearer call; through the studs and drywall, the faint peal of stifled sobs could be heard.

_Nice work, Tifa. Did you really think she wouldn't be able to hear all that shouting?_

She set about leaving Barret's room to go and set things right, but on her second step toward the door the ground spun out from under her.

Had reflexes been the only factor, the martial arts virtuoso would have most likely been able to execute some sort of amazing trick to regain equilibrium. But a nimble body is useless under the weight of a weary spirit, and at that moment Tifa didn't have the spirit to execute so much as a yelp of surprise as she fell backwards.

Her head splashed through four corners of brittle silver and the room started spinning. Pieces of chromed shrapnel rained on the floor, painting a fractured portrait of the ceiling. Tifa could feel other pieces crunching under her, cutting into her back…

Seven years bad luck.

_Seven years ago. Nibelheim. Sephiroth. Cloud. Photograph. Reactor. Avalanche. Barret. Fight. Ghadma Liberation Front. Refinery. Ibsen. Shinra. Planet… Reactor…_

Too many damned pieces.

She reached around between her shoulder blades and felt a large chunk of mirror wedged into the skin at an oblique angle. She gritted her teeth and pulled it out.

"Ffffff!"

She held the shard to her face: a scratch above the eyebrow; a thin score under the ear – other than that and some shallow wounds on her back, nothing else was bleeding. She tossed the shard on the floor with its cousins headed for the door again, this time keeping an eye out for whatever it was she'd slipped on the first time around.

She found the culprit exactly where she'd fallen: a small green orb, returned to the scene of the crime by backspin.

_Well, at least you can play marbles with Marlene now…_


	21. On the Other Side of the Mountain

It was shortly before noon in the realm of Mount Nibel. A wooly goat perched on one of the taller crags looked down and stared blankly at three colored dots – two coated in red and one crowned by yellow – moving like insects on the distant verdure.

Green pastures would not color their path much farther. Soon they would be in a place of black rock, the barren land. Even the goat with its simple brain knows to stay out of those parts: in the realm of Mount Nibel, all living things able to remain as such recognize one way or another the evil resting among those peaks beyond the foothills.

But for now Cloud doesn't pay attention to the mountain's approaching shadow; he walks with his friends along the dimpled landscape and enjoys the moment. The sun is warm and dry on his face. The sensation tugs at a thread inside him, a thread tangled up in a hundred more; his scalp begins to tickle and forgotten memory unravels itself

Cloud hears his father's voice singing at the breakfast table:

_Morning is here,_

_The board is spread._

_Thanks to the Lord_

_who gives us bread._

And Cloud tries to picture the man's face, but all he can see is a blonde-bearded mouth: he sees a mustache frosted with homebrew… an enormous set of hairy knuckles allowing him a taste of the sweet solstice wine...

The memories end there. Cloud's father died when he was very young. A woodsman to the end, he refused to abandon the way of his forefathers to make room for new technology. He ignored the Shinra Company's warning to stay out of the mountains and went to his wood to chop, as the men in the family had done for centuries.

He was killed in an avalanche caused by the detonations Shinra was using to clear land for the new mountain Reactor.

"Terribly sad business," the ombudsman said. "But what can you do? Sometimes an ox steps on the tracks."

Cloud's mother received a crisp two hundred Gil note for her loss, and that was the end of that.

The trees are now starting to wear thin now; the mountains are drawing closer. But Cloud doesn't think about that.

He was only four years old when his father died. Today he counts himself twenty-three years old, even though he has only lived eighteen of them. From ages of sixteen to twenty-one – the time in which a boy becomes a man – his life existed only to serve to Hojo's curiosity, left to float comatose in a tank of mako solution.

Twenty-three years and five of them were as a goddamn pickle.

Mentally, Cloud can still mature in the years ahead of him. Physiological growth, however, is another matter. The side effects of Mako infusion therapy are well documented: in addition to the trademark tapetum lucidium ("Mako eyes"), early test studies mention cases of stunted growth and decreases in testosterone. While the former had the benefit of increased night vision and went on to become the prided mark of Shinra's elite army, the latter two were gladly eliminated from the final product by limiting the dosage to one treatment a month.

Cloud, on the other hand, was in a constant state of exposure for five years. The result is a body forever preserved in its sixteen-year-old state. Now he can never reach manhood; he will never attain his father's hearty build and beard, never see a hair on his chest. With each passing year, as the chances of Mako-induced sterility increase and the Jenova cells rewrite his DNA, Cloud's prospects of siring children will shrink. His features will age without maturing, retaining their youthful shape while losing vitality like a timeworn facelift. Maybe his face will come to have the embalmed quality of Vincent's… or worse yet, the fey waxwork of Sephiroth's. Common themes of Hojo's work.

This is a typical example of how memory works inside Cloud's brain: one moment he's nurturing vignettes from a happier time, the next moment he's associating them with something traumatic. If he thinks of his father jovial at the breakfast table, then he must also think of his father's death, or how he will never become a father himself. Even the simplest pleasures recalled by Cloud are poisoned by the retrospective knowledge of where their lead. The warmth of the hearth bursts into the searing flames of conflagration; his mother's pot roast rots into the smell of rendering human fat; clipped fits of innocent laughter are stretched into screams across the smoking night. Whatever it is, it leads to tragedy just a little further down the road.

He's been walking down this path with Nanaki and Vincent for an hour now… maybe two.

Until it comes down to the dreaded mountain, the road into Nibel is a quiet one, an idyllic alpine scene like the one you find might on your grandmother's decorative plates. Evergreens wag and ruffle in the breeze. Trees struck naked by winter stem and diffuse their branches like capillaries in an invisible body. Pristine white clouds roll forward with the West wind.

But a little further east and the wind withers and rots. A livid gloom spreads through the sky, coloring it like gangrene. Grass turns to dirt and dirt turns to rock; the highlands break like a wave, buttery browns and greens washing away over endless slopes of fissured gray and shadow.

It is from this point on that Mount Nibel becomes the grotesque and dangerous place everyone thinks of when they hear the name.

Cloud has arrived at that point.

He knew this was coming, even if he refused to see it coming. But it's here now and he has to face it. He looks into the distance and sees the trail leading to a labyrinth of crooked stones and jagged peaks. He sees blonde beards, yellow flames, familiar faces twisted into unrecognizable shapes, dead bodies and shredded knees. He sees ropes fraying, bridges breaking between five years of Mako-poisoned dreams and misplaced biography. He sees breasts thrust with steel and pale green stones that fall like the shooting stars in the sky over dried-out wells and empty childhood promises.

For a moment he hesitates to keep going.

"Cloud?"

But he has to keep going, because the journey isn't finished yet.

"Is something the matter?"

Cloud turned around and saw Red XIII stopped behind him.

"I… I'm fine." He shouldered his pack and carried on. "Let's go, this way will take us to the end."

"Appropriately enough," Red XIII remarked as he looked up the dark path ahead.

"Hm," Vincent followed. "So the nightmare begins… again."

.

.

.

The people of Nibelheim are an unusual case, even if their thoughts are too regular to see how – which is why they were targeted for the singular project in which they unwittingly take part. They are a graft, a community of transplants, sewn over the bleeding site of Sephiroth's massacre. Under these conditions, their perfectly normal behavior is decided odd: the good people of Nibelheim tread over the bones of their predecessors with blithe indifference and they sleep beside their ghosts with the greatest tranquility.

Of course, they only behave this way because they don't know any better.

After their poster child went off the deep end and slaughtered an entire village of innocents, Shinra immediately went to putting a massive cover-up in effect. At first, this meant restoring the scorched buildings and repopulating the town with employees posing as citizenry; over time, however, these actors were gradually phased out and replaced with unsuspecting homebuyers. Not only did this cut the cost of employees and generate income from the real estate, but their actual ignorance proved far more convincing. In less than five years the homes were all filled, save for the mansion, which remained the Shinra family's property until Rufus Jr. was killed and a Mr. W.C. Mann bought the place shortly thereafter.

Since then the neighborhood has been relatively quiet. With the exception of a black-robed cult passing through town and a crazy spiky-haired kid – probably on drugs – rambling about everybody dying in a fire, the replacement Nibelheimers have seen no disturbances to their peaceful, oblivious way of life.

Until now.

Some time before noon a hundred men dressed in SOLDIER uniforms had invaded the town, declaring it under marshal law for the next twenty-four hours. Many of the villagers contested their authority on the grounds that SOLDIER no longer existed; their concerns were answered in kind with automatic beatings and reiterations of the same decree: stay inside until tomorrow afternoon.

Those who tried to call for help by way of electronic communication discovered that the town's modest infrastructure had been sabotaged – even the old telegraph poles were down. The once happily ignorant Nibelheimers thus came to know terror in their lack of knowing, left now with little choice but to wait and wonder in the isolation of their homes. The children were sent upstairs to play while the adults paced through their parlors and pondered why, of all the places in the great wide Planet, these self-styled "Soldiers" had targeted their humble little burg.

Who had the power to order such a thing?

Who would even want to?

.

.

.

_Somewhere this body is encapsulated in darkness, suspended in a liquid prison. For how long it has been condemned I cannot say, but it won't be much longer. The veil is about to be lifted, the darkness ripped away. If this body had sight before I endowed it with my own, at that moment it would have seen on the a wretched man in a filthy white coat on the other side of the glass, tearing at the clunky object standing between them. When he finally gets a purchase on the thing and rips it out from the waist, what he holds is gaudy and grotesque. If a satanic cult of robots ever built a sailing ship, the figurehead on the prow might look something like this. It is both machine and sculpture, computer and chemical conduits housed in the outward-bound torso of a mechanical harpy. The sexless ceramic mask supplying its face trickles dark discharge from the eye sockets and mouth. The old man heaves this wretched thing aside, but I think better of it and have him use it for a bludgeon against the reinforced glass tank. When the surface is adequately fissured, I have him to deliver the final blow with his own mass, diving headlong into the window. Blue formaldehyde rushes forth and slicks the laboratory floor. The old man is convulsing now, hoist on a shard in the opening he so bluntly rent. Good riddance – although in truth I'm not so sure he's technically been alive these past few minutes. Well, either way he's dead now. I leave his corpse behind and take up the reigns of this new thing inside the tank. I lend it my senses and volition – give it a test-run, so to speak._

_What miserable flesh! Immediately the body begins to give out, unable to sustain the burden of animation, unable to survive outside its tank. It seems that my experiment has ended as soon as it has begun._

_But then I remember something else, something I saw in the fading light of the old man's mind… in this case it might do some good. Curiosity demands I try anyhow. Who knows? Perhaps this will be a worthwhile speculation after all. One possible use has already entered my mind…_

"Sir?"

A sick man draped in white looked up and saw the stern face of Rude, waiting on him for a response.

"Is everything all right?"

"Yes, thank you. I was just… recalling something." He cleared his throat. "What's the latest news?"

"Good," answered Rude. "The town is captured."

"Of course it is," said the invalid, a sallow little smile parting between the folds of his linen. "If you were incapable of such a basic task I'd have eaten you by now."

Rude's expression said nothing; his words fell to the effect that if his draft were no longer worth its oats he should be grateful for the redemption of serving his master in nourishment.

"Indeed." The lame man nodded with little interest. "Any word from your sister?"

"She's waiting outside."

"Yes, I thought I sensed her... bring her in."

"Right away, sir."

Rude withdrew from the study and, shortly thereafter, a blonde woman carrying a large trunk appeared in his place.

The man in white greeted her enthusiastically: "Ah, Elena, beautiful as ever… welcome home! It seems Wutai was a success."

She set the trunk on her master's desk. "The items you requested."

"Yes, good…" He popped the lid of the trunk and ran a bony finger over the colorful, candy-like orbs within. "Very good. And the infected?"

"Right here, sir."

Rude walked in with Yuffie Kisaragi, squirming in his grip. She was cold, she was tired, she was a little queasy; but in the last fifteen hours, she had never wavered in her resistance.

She screamed, kicked, bit and spat. "Lemme go, you creeps!" "I'm warning you! You'll spark an international incident! The entire Wutai army will be on your ass!"

"Oh!" The man in white made a wheezing sound like laughter. "Feisty thing, isn't she?"

He held up his hand and Yuffie's struggling ceased at once. The same invisible force that controlled her movements the night before now took hold of her legs, forcing their steps forward. She walked up to the edge of her captor's desk and bowed over it submissively, trembling with stifled horror and umbrage.

"Such a charming creature…" The cripple cocked a thumb under her chin and lifted her gaze onto him. "A pity. It would be a pleasure to have you join us, but I don't have the means to provide for a larger family..." He turned to Elena. "It's only been fifteen hours since the cells have been introduced into her system, correct?"

"Correct," said Elena.

"Mm, yes… still good."

And then man in the white did something utterly terrifying…

He removed his hood.

Yuffie squealed at the ruined visage underneath. His face, if it can be called that, was almost completely crusted over with black, necrotic flesh. The only part spared was a slice of face between eight and twelve o'clock, which showed a milky blue eye and some blonde wisps still clinging to the barren scalp. His nose terminated halfway from his brow. His lips were fused to the sinews of his chin and cheeks.

"Oh my god!" Yuffie gasped.

But when she tried to close her mouth it remained stubbornly agape, held open as if by some invisible clamp. Yuffie then realized that she was no longer in control of her jaw.

The man in white opened his own rotting mouth now. Continuing to exercise control of Yuffie's motions, he had her come closer, until their faces came within an inch of each other. Yuffie could do nothing but clench her eyes shut, and that only focused the displeasure of her other senses. She smelled an odor like mothballs and hardboiled eggs. It was his breath. She could feel it closing in, heavy and labored, hot against her face now…

God have mercy, her mouth still wasn't able to close.

Yuffie whimpered and told herself it would be like bobbing for apples.

Brown, mushy, fermented apples.

Suddenly and violently, the invalid sucked on her face like a leech. Yuffie gave a muffled cry of disgust. Ten seconds into the ordeal she felt a lump of something slimy rise from her throat, wriggling like a slug. It was alive, and it was coming from inside _her_. Yuffie wanted to scream, to pull away, but her hijacked muscles were relaxed with a sickening ease. At last, the stuff passed from her mouth to that of her tormentor. His control over her vanished with the purged matter; she pitched backwards and fell to the floor, as objects tend to do when straining against an opposing force that is suddenly lifted.

And that, gentle reader, is what the oral transmission of Jenova cells looks like.

The man in white seemed to benefit immediately. Bits of the black crust on his face fell from the flesh like scabs, revealing a smoother tissue underneath. Cracks and fissures began to contract and film over.

Believe it or not, Yuffie also came away from this exchange better off: even as she doubled over and gagged on the taste of disease and decay, overall she was glad to be relieved of an alien substance germinating inside of her.

"Ugh…" She rose to her feet woozily. "Barforama…"

The invalid grinned wickedly and replaced his hood. "Take her away. She will be leverage along with the rest. We can always kill her later."

"What?!" Yuffie's screamed. "No, wait! Please! I'll… I'll pretend to like it next time! I – Mmmph!"

Rude put his hand over her mouth and dragged her from the study.

The man in white seemed satisfied. He turned to Elena and said:

"This is it, child. All that remains is your brother's task in the city… the rest will take care of itself. Tonight, after all these years of waiting and languishing, our cause will finally be realized."


	22. Correspondence and Catastrophe Two Ways

The buzzer rang once.

_"May I help you?" _the intercom squawked

"Yeah," answered the caller, "I was just wondering if you knew any pet-friendly hotels around here."

_"One moment."_

Several moments later a large tawny man released the magnetic locks on the door and greeted Barret in a thick northern accent: "Ah, Mr. Jones, we were not to be expecting you of this time. The next meeting is not for many days."

"I need to talk to Hagar."

"Aha… I am sorry, but Mr. Qim right now finds himself busy."

**_Nyuuurrrr!_**

"Too bad," Barret replied to an empty doorway, slipping the exit materia back into his pocket.

Inside the place looked like an ordinary warehouse: sealed concrete floors, low-bay lighting fixtures, hoary brick walls and windows of cloudy chicken-wire glass sealed shut with age. Pallet racks stocked with a variety of ovens and mixers and things like that were put out for facade; any outsiders brought to this place by accident or officialdom were made to believe that it was a storage facility owned by a baking equipment distributor.

None of them would have ever guessed that they were looking at the Midgar headquarters of the Ghadma Liberation Front.

Barret walked across the phony storage area to a large convection oven placed against eastern wall. A few weeks prior he had observed on the sly one of the Liberationists operating the machine to its true purpose; he repeated the motions now to the best of his memory, producing eventually through trial and error the following sequence: ninety degrees clockwise on the black knobs, ninety counterclockwise on the red.

Success. Hydraulics churned and a rectangular segment broke away from the floor, lowering Barret and the oven into a hidden basement.

"Oldest trick in the book," he murmured.

He stepped off the platform and moved swiftly into a grimy, pipe-tangled corridor. The path was long and convoluted, yet all twists and turns inevitably arrived at the same conclusion: the basement led to nothing but a fire exit.

A fire exit guarded by a secret entrance?

Barret slammed down on the crash bar and threw the door open. Gold light immediately rushed into the darkness of the basement, shocking his dilated pupils into momentary blindness. He shut his eyes to the glare and felt a warm and not unpleasant odor waft over him, thick with the musk of incense and honeyed tobacco. A moment later his eyes adjusted to the light.

He could scarcely believe them.

Somehow, someway, that squalid colon of a basement had led him to a room fit for a palace.

"Extravagant" doesn't even begin to cover it. This place was rococo down to the doorstop. There was not a visible shape with a single edge that hadn't been licked by filigrees or some sort of arabesque. False windows fitted with verisimilar paintings of a garden lent the illusion of the room belonging to some grand chateau in the country. The curtains were of gilded silk, the woodwork inlaid with pearl tesserae, the walls painted marble. At the end of the room two men sat by a fireplace, side by side in sofa chairs with very tall backs that obscured their identities from posterior view. From this angle, Barret could see them only by the tasseled tops of their fez hats, a pair of white-spatted shoes draped over an ottoman before the chair on the left, and hands reaching from both sides to a mahogany table, which upheld a multitude of pleasures between them: chai, saffron pistachio cake, a grand hookah with velvet hoses extending both ways…

"Iber," said the chair on the right, the hand setting down its tea, "I thought I told you not to disturb us!"

"Iber's been relocated," Barret muttered.

"What?" Suddenly, the chair on the right gave birth to an olive-complexioned man with a thin mustache. When his eye crossed with Barret's a nervous twitch crept into his countenance, yet he immediately remade himself with such fluidity that a veteran poker player would have been hard-pressed to detect the lapse. He proceeded with a casual nod and said coolly, "Ah, Mr. Jones… this is surely a surprise."

"I'll say," groused Barret. "Pretty fancy digs for an urban guerilla."

"I like to be comfortable," Qim replied, his affected smile breaking into irritation. "Now, would you mind telling what you think are doing breaking into my sanctum?"

"I came here to tell you I'm out."

"Pardon?"

"I said I'm out!" Barret snapped. "The bombs, the Front, the refineries… I'm done with it!"

"I see…"

"Don't trouble yourself Hagar," a third voice murmured, "I've got this."

The chair on the left stirred; the spats stood up. "Well then, I guess you must be 'Frank Jones.'" crimson-streaked cheeks dipped into a derisive smirk. "Fancy running into you like this, I was just about to pay you a visit… Care for some cake?"

"Reno!? You're with the Front?"

The former Turk removed the fez from his head and laughed. "Don't be ridiculous," he said, "The Front's with me."

"What?"

"That's right, Qim and his merry men here are working for my employer." Reno held up his Public Safety Services badge. "And wouldn't you know, it's also the same folks who control a certain department I just happen to be in charge of."

Barret said the name through clenched teeth: "Shinra…"

"Don't take it the wrong way… I mean, this cop gig is pretty sweet, but don't know if I'd give up my pension plan for it." Reno put away his badge and had drew a gun now, waving it aimlessly and with such carelessness that you'd think he used it to stir his coffee in morning. "Nah," he continued, "this is just a promotion, see. There's a whole mess of dough out there to be made from all this reformed government business, and we're not about to let some goons like Ibsen muscle in on our turf."

"So, that's where suckers like me come in, right?"

"Well I don't know, that's an awfully cold way of putting it. I prefer to think of you as our honored guest: Barret Wallace, the greatest saboteur of all time! Do you have any idea how much trouble we went through just to get you?"

Barret's scowl darkened.

"Well then, allow me to jog your memory. It's a couple a months ago, you're working at the construction site and you're one your lunch break. You talk to the new guy, try to make him feel all welcome and stuff. He says he comes from a small village in the Middle North, says he used to have a wife up there before Ibsen's mercenaries torched the place. Of course you eat it right up. A few weeks go by and you two continue talking, maybe even grab a couple of beers after work. Slowly but surely this guy shares more details about his personal life. One day he mentions a certain 'activist' organization he volunteers for. He asks you to come with him to a meeting… "

Barret growled. "Son of a bitch…"

"Oh yeah, we knew you'd go for it. What kind of a guy has more uses for a gun than a hand? I've worked with some real goons in my day, and let me tell you, I know that killer instinct when I see it–"

"I didn't kill anybody!"

"Well ring-a-ding-sing, you want that on at-shirt?" Reno pointed his gun directly at Barret now, not so much to threaten as to belittle him. "Listen buddy, the only reason you didn't kill anybody is because we didn't want you to. Would've just generated unnecessary sympathy for Ibsen. But if we needed a real high body count for some stupid reason, we could've just as easily handed you a bigger bomb – like you can tell the difference, right? So no, you don't decide the outcome; you're just instrumental." Reno paused on this point. "Huh… maybe you're right then, 'killer' isn't really the proper term…"

He looked at his pistol and it came to him.

"A weapon… that's what you are. A mindless tool. A loaded gun that could fall into anyone's hands – even kids who don't know any better, right? Like that girl I whacked in Sector Seven…ah, you know, whatsherface–"

"Jessie!"

"Yeah, her. Now there was an amateur if I ever saw one. Going by the job you guys did on Reactor One, I'd say she still had quite a bit to learn about the art of controlled demolition. All those lives, resting on which way the wind's blowing? Tsk-tsk." The former Turk's lips twisted into an especially vile smirk. "You know, it's too bad she couldn't stick around to see the pillar come down. Maybe she would've learned someth–"

"BASTARD!" Barret's brain erupted into fireball. He launched straight at Reno, hands gripping the air in anticipation of a throat. "I'LL FEED YOU YOUR GODDAMN HEART!"

Having a gun pointed in his face changed his mind rather quickly.

"Ah-ah-ah!" Reno wagged his finger mockingly. "Remember who's got the conch here. And don't think I don't know about the materia in your pocket either. If I see so much as a twinkle of green your brains are going on the floor… so let's keep our heads and try to leave the cashmere rug out of this, capeesh?"

Barret grunted once and his rage vanished into a sudden wave of calm. Green and purple lights danced around everything.

He was looking at feet now… sideways, the floor parallel to his line of vision… voices, talking now… arabesques and filigrees spreading like vines… spreading into darkness… silence…

A PSS officer stood over the felled giant, prepared to deliver another blow with the butt of his rifle.

"Enough," said Reno. "He's out cold. Good work, Officer White."

"Yes," said Qim, smiling coldly. "Very entertaining to watch. Now then, Commissioner, I believe you and I were about to get down to a matter of business."

"Ooh yeah, _that_…" Reno winced and cleared his throat. "Uh, listen Hagar, I'll keep it short and sweet. It looks like Shinra won't be having any more use for the Ghadma Liberation Front at this time."

"They… won't?"

"'Fraid not. I've got orders to erase all evidence of our transactions here."

"Trust me, I keep no record of–" Qim paused. A leak had sprung from his forehead.

He fell backwards, blinked for few seconds, and died.

"Sorry, I don't trust a man who sells out his own people." Reno holstered his gun and grimaced at the red stains on his spats. "White?"

"Yes, sir."

"Call in a cleanup crew. I want this place gone – removed, poof, all traces eliminated – you get my drift?"

"What about him?" The officer motioned toward Barret with his rifle.

"Cuff him. He goes in the keep pile."

.

.

.

Evening was upon Rocket Town. The sun was retreating west, the sky becoming colorful and dim. Beneath the changing sphere a pair of dust-caked boots rambled forward, grinding on an endless shuffle of _just one more step._

A concerned citizen spotted the weary, dusty figure of what he took for a drifter and called out to ask if he was all right.

The question went unheeded and the figure pressed on, boots scraping at the same dogged pace down the old dirt road. A thousand scrapes later and the road finally found its end, at the threshold of a plain-looking house on the northern edge of town. Here the boots took their rest, as it fell to a grease-blackened glove to turn the knob and clear the final step home.

Shera heard the door opening and held her breath.

"Then… does this mean…?"

Stubble-grained chops tweaked with a faint grin. "Yeah."

"Oh, Cid!" She rushed to the doorway and threw her arms around him. "You did it, you really did it!"

"Course I did," he whispered. "I'm never letting anything get between us. Not again."

Shera squeezed him fiercely in her arms, releasing the ineffable emotion as if she were wringing it a cloth. After unburdening herself in this way for a good thirty seconds, she concluded with a deep cleansing breath and loosened her grip.

Cid couldn't help but smile when Shera's face came back into view. Her ponytail was flipped over her head and her glasses had nearly fallen off. What set him over the edge though was how the dust on his shoulder had mixed with tears and left a muddy print on her cheek.

He burst into laughter.

"Wha? Oh!" Shera lifted a hand to straighten her appearance.

Cid snatched it away. "Don't change a thing."

And then, with her hand in his, he leaned forward and kissed her

"Mm… mph." She broke away timidly. "Ah-um… that's enough for now!"

"What? Is it my breath? It's my breath, isn't it?"

"No, it's just that, uh–"

"What?'

Shera blushed. "We're not alone."

Cid looked over her shoulder and saw a five-hundred-pound stuffed animal come out of his kitchen.

_"Hi."_

**.**

**.**

The sky over the eastern horizon was shot pink and rimed with gold; above it a band of blue displayed the pale beginnings of night, in which the moon and a few odd planets could be seen shining diaphanously through the day's fading residue.

Cid looked up at it with a twisted mouth.

_"So that's where things stand right now," _Reeve's voice crackled over the moogle's radio, capping off what must have tallied to over ten minutes of recapitulation.

"Well, I can take you over the mountains..." Cid brought his eyes down to earth and set them on his friend's avatar. "If this here thing can track Cait's position like you say it can, we'll be able to drop it within a couple kilometers of your crew."

_"Thanks. I fear they might need the extra muscle."_

"Why'd you waste your time coming here then?" Cid asked bluntly.

_"Well, I mean, we haven't spoken since that ridiculous talk show... and then, when I heard you were gone… I don't know, I just felt compelled to come here and make sure everything was all right."_

"Someone puts a bullet in you and you're worried about me?"

_"Well, and Shera…"_

"Yeah, and Shera...." Cid reached under his jacket and scratched his arm uncomfortably. A square of white peeked out from under his sleeve.

_"What's that?"_

"Oh, this?" He bared his arm to reveal a nicotine patch. "I'm quitting, if you can believe it."

_"An admirable project," _said Reeve,_ " My hat goes off to _said_ you," _To which he added_, "so is that what you and Shera have been struggling with?"_

"Sure would make things a helluva lot more simple!" Cid replied, coughing up a halfhearted chuckle. "I guess Shera didn't tell you then…"

_"Tell me what?"_

"She's pregnant."

_"I see. Congratulations."_

Cid acknowledged the courtesy with an automatic nod as he ruminated on some difficult thought. "You know," he began, "this whole time I thought it was just my own life I was burning away in those goddamn sticks… but I guess we're all kinda connected, aren't we?" He looked up from his little fenced-in backyard and set his sights out into the infinite. "I've realized that over these last few days…we gotta think about the big picture. We have to kick our addictions so our children will have clean air to breathe."

_"Cid, I…" _Reeve's voice came soft and searching from behind his avatar's inscrutably minimal features. "_Are you saying--"_

"Yeah, I'm backing out on the oil industry. Shera's convinced me of this global warming thing, says the scientific evidence is indisputable… and who am I to dispute that with a scientist?"

_"So you're boycotting fossil fuels completely?"_

"That's the idea."

_"But how will you fly?"_

"I won't. I walked back here you know. The Tiny Bronco's laying in some ditch right now."

_"Wow. A little on the extreme side there, aren't we?"_

"Yeah, but then if I was capable of moderation my lungs wouldn't like a chimneysweep's ass cheeks."

_"So you really are giving up the skies..." _Reeve thought aloud, clearly moved by the notion.

"Listen man, I love the sky – clear, blue skies. All my life I've tried to get as close to them as I can… but if we keep on trying to get closer, soon they won't be so clear and blue anymore, you see what I'm saying? It's like if we try to have this world all to ourselves, there isn't gonna be any world left!"

_Yes," _said Reeve,_ " find joy not in the possession of things, but in their being."_

Cid smiled. "Hmm, that's some pretty deep stuff there."

_"Thanks, I stole it from Red."_

They both laughed.

"Ah, Red… I haven't talked to that guy in forever! One of these days we gotta dust off the old PHS and get the group together over some beers or something-- "

_"Hey, what do you think you're doing here?"_

"Huh?"

_"You can't just barge in and—oh God, no!"_

The moogle began to flail about wildly, performing one motion after another as though its controls were being mashed at random.

"Reeve, you all right over there?!"

Instead of an answer, a cacophony of voices and violent noises came across the choppy transmission:

_"Hold him down! Argh! Cid, can you hear me? I'm being…………don't know if……No! Aghhh! Take out that computer station!………Ci……go……urry bef….oo late!"_

The radio went silent. The moogle's convulsions ceased.

"Reeve? Reeve!"Cid took the robot by its shoulders and shook frantically.

It answered him with a distressed howl: "Arooo!"

Reeve's signal was gone. His avatar was operating solely on its AI now, which left it about as intelligent and intelligible as a chimp.

Cid was lightly more articulate:

"Shit."


	23. Capture and Captivity

In the dull gray stillness of the Seventh Heaven a jot of color occasionally flickered across the floor and broke the silence with a jittery clack.

**_Clack._**

And then the silence would resume.

Tifa had a square of gauze taped onto the laceration between her shoulders. Marlene's eyes were still swollen from recent tears.

This was their attempt at having fun.

Another streak of color shot across the dining room floor, penetrating a jaggedly laid circle of tape there.

**_Clack._**

"When's Papa coming back?"

Tifa stalled and chewed her truth was the best she could come up with: "I don't know."

"Oh…" Marlene lowered her eyes understandingly. "Do… do we have to keep playing?"

"Do whatever you like, sweetie."

The child stared at the marbles on the floor with a detached expression, like a sick person looking at food. After a moment of deliberation she suddenly she swept them all into the apron of her jumper. "I was going to win anyway," she murmured joylessly.

Footsteps sounded out front and she perked up at once:

"Papa?"

The caller knocked at the door.

"Wait here," Tifa uttered almost apprehensively, "I'll get it."

She went to the door and opened up to a thin, scrappy man in a sloppily done-up blue suit. If they weren't already acquainted, she might have taken him for a burnt-out titty-bar operator who spent his nights off with a paper bag and a tube of airplane glue – actually, this would have been an improvement over her established notion of the man.

"Good evening, miss Lockheart," Reno drawled oddly.

"Uh, evening commissioner – Marlene go wait in the kitchen – may I help you?"

"Nnhyes." He sniffled and rubbed his eye on his sleeve. "Right. So, ah, there've been some, developments in the case regarding your shooting Mr… I mean, in regards to your friend shooting… to Mr. Tuesti getting shot, the uh…anyway, with your permission we'd like to have you, like maybe right now, if you could come down to the precinct and answer a few more questions for us... we'd, well, you know, if you'd be so kind…" An unsettling inclination kinked in his grin; he raised his eyes to Tifa strangely.

For a moment she thought she saw his pupils narrow into slivers, like…

Like…

She blinked and it was gone.

"Something the matter, Ms. Lockheart?"

"Uh, no…" She shook her head as if recovering from a daze. "Listen, You know I'd like to help out, but now's just not a good time. I have a child to look after."'

"Oh, that's alright. She can come too."

"I, ah…"

Something was wrong with this picture, and it wasn't Reno's creepy deportment (that was all good and well for a creep). No, there was something else, something she wasn't noticing – Tifa shifted her efforts from trying to read the former Turk's sketchy expressions and focused on the whole of what was in front of her. She no longer met his eyes but passed over them, zeroing in on a strange cluster of shapes reflected in the window of the wig shop across the street...

"Marlene! Run!"

Face struck flat on palm. There was a crack and a cry.

"God DAMMIT!" Reno staggered backwards clutching his nose, blood oozing between his fingers. "I thought I told you idiots away to stay out of sight!"

A team of PSS officers armed from face to foot in heavy combat gear appeared behind him.

"Sir, are you alright?"

"Who gives a crap? Get HER, you worthless pieces of piss!"

The officers shuffled through the door in perfect form, guns and bodies observant to the strictures of their training. Each of them was a part to the same well-oiled machine; moving as one, seeing as one, aiming in every direction with seamless rotation…

And still, not one of them found anything killable between his crosshairs.

"_She's got to be here somewhere,"_ the leader's voice grumbled over the others' headsets. _"Fan out and find her!"_

They divided into sections and combed the area methodically, scanning under, over, and between every table and chair for some sign of the target.

**_Clack!_**

"There!"

They all fired in the direction of the sound at once, emptying their clips into a dining booth on the eastern wall.

"_Alpha team, what's going on in there?"_

"We've engaged the target. Still awaiting visual confirmation – wait, I think we have something…"

As the last report faded and stillness resumed, there emerged from the wreckage a solitary bauble, limping from the last of its ricochets to a gradual stop.

"_Alpha team, what is it?"_

.

"A marble?!" Reno honked furiously through his bloody handkerchief. "Well ring-a-ding-ding! While you're at it why don't you tell me what kind of color of the wallpaper is!" He shoved the radio back in his pocket and turned to the officers waiting outside the diner with him on standby. "What're you dipshits looking at? Back to work!"

They all lowered their heads and milled about themselves like scolded children.

"You think they got her?" one of them whispered.

"Of course!" another answered cockily.

"I don't know… I heard she's a master of hand-to-hand martial arts."

"Well then, unless she's also a master of hand-to-gun, I'd say the odds are in our favor."

"Yeah, but still…"

"Come on, what chance does one chick have against Midgar's finest?"

Just then a shining example of "Midgar's finest" came crashing down on the pavement before them, landing in a motionless ruin of tangled blinds and broken glass.

"Well boys," Reno snorted, "your turn at bat."

.

Exploiting the surprise from her diversion, Tifa was able to get close enough to engage the PSS in close-quarters-combat. After sneaking up from behind and chucking the rearmost officer out the window, she launched into the thick of the formation and lashed at from all sides; kick to the head here, knee to the groin there. She spun around and unloaded a Beat Rush into one officer's stomach—

Her fists met with Kevlar.

_Bulletproof. Great. _

She threw her foe aside as two more approached: one from the right and one from the left. They raised their rifles and aimed.

The words of her sensei flashed through her head in an instant:

"_Remember, Tifa-san, no matter how strong the enemy's armor might be…"_

She grabbed the officer to her right and snapped his elbow backwards.

"_If they can bend it, you can break it." _

The one on the left opened fire, followed by the rest; Tifa grabbed her recently disabled opponent by his broken arm and forced herself behind him, using his armored body to cover her retreat behind the bar.

"Put a couple gas shots back there," the team leader grunted.

Huddled in the trenches, Tifa's eyes went immediately to the groaning hostage she'd dragged down with her. He'd taken several hits as her human shield, yet his armor didn't have a single bullet to show for it – there were only darts, little flechettes sticking out everywhere. Without pause she plucked one up and jammed it into the injured man's neck.

His groans ceased. Asleep... no sign of poison.

They wanted her alive.

She wouldn't have guessed it from the way their guns were firing off those tranquillizer rounds, though. Above her head the darts were hitting the wall with such force that the bottles on the back bar were now reduced to a current of broken glass and spattered booze.

_Bottles…_

Suddenly there was a sound like two giant champagne bottles being uncorked. A pair of canisters spouting streams toxic fog descended over the bar. Tifa's eyes began to sting; she shut them tight. Her throat started to burn; she pinched her nose and held her breath. She groped frantically for her tranquilized officer's head, blindly fumbling with one hand to undo his helmet and gas mask -- an endless sea of buckles and straps. Soon she let go of her nose and was using both hands to navigate the tactile labyrinth, prying frantically at what she prayed to be the helmet's release mechanism. Gas wafted over her exposed nostrils, caused her eyes water. She clawed at the inert man's head with increasing desperation now, the air in her lungs rioting more and more violently against its confinement…

She released it, ceasing her struggle and breathing in.

At length the team leader motioned the other officers forward. "That ought to do it. Move in."

A bottle of pure grain alcohol plugged with a burning strip of gauze came flying straight at them.

"Oh shi–"

Fire splashed over the slower men. Those quick enough to avoid the fate of their comrades rolling on the floor were left to face the wrath of one categorically angry waitress.

It's true, what they say: don't piss off the people who handle your food.

She tore the gas mask from her face and launched a Somersault Kick off the bar top, landing a blow to one officer's chin that nearly snapped his neck back like a cigarette lighter. The remaining officers attacked predictably: she weaved in and out of their shots, snatched away their weapons, turned one man's gunfire against the other, popped their shoulders out of the sockets and beat their unbreakable heads until the brains within were shaken into concussion…

"That's enough!"

Reno stood at the center of the room, electro-mag rod cracking with cruel sparks just a few inches from frightened puppy eyes and delicate baby fat cheeks.

"T-tifa?"

She abandoned her stance. "Marlene!?"

"What's the matter," Reno sneered, "thought the little runt could get away? No, nonono; my guys, MY guys had every exit blocked, see. I was just holding on to little Susie here till I got bored watching you kick the utter crap out of my men." A shaky smile appeared in the stream of blood running down the Turk's face. "And I must say, you're a very talented lady. I haven't had my nose broken since I lost my virginity, heh…"

"Harm her and I'll tear your head off," Tifa asserted with calm and steady hatred.

"Ah, well then, I think we can all then agree it'd might be maybe best for you to come along quietly then… capeesh?"

.

.

.

With his tangled hair and beard, pain-worn features, and a grubby hospital gown as his only scrap of clothing, Reeve lent something of a medieval torture-chamber quality to the rather plain holding cell he'd been confined to at PSS Headquarters, in the former Shinra building.

He'd woken queasy and shivering, nearly unable to feel his hands and feet. He was still feeling the effects of the drug the police had used to put him under when they snatched him up. Being an intelligent man, his first semi-conscious thoughts went immediately to the incongruity there: why would four or five officers feel the need to chemically restrain a bed-ridden man barely capable of fighting back?

The answer came immediately, for it was also his first instinct: to call for help.

They must have known that Cait Sith was active and online. They must have known that, left awake, Reeve would have been able to sign on to one of his two avatars using his cerebral implant, thus informing the outside world of his wrongful detention. They knew to attack his computer station first, before he could tell Cid what was going on. They knew. This wasn't the result of gross error or base misconduct: this was a deliberate plot. And how deep the conspiracy must run, for them to be able to waltz into Sector Three Memorial and make off with a patient — a public figure, no less!

The thought of it whipped Reeve into desperate outrage. "This is the future we fought for? Locked up without charge, without trial, without justice?!" Still somewhat disoriented from the drugs, he punched the wall in frustration, only to howl like a tragic buffoon as the recoil reminded him of the hole in his shoulder.

Barret glanced disinterestedly at this ruckus going on behind him.

"Well?" Reeve scowled at him in pain and irritation. "Do you have something to say about any of this? Or are you just going to sit there and stare like all night?"

The dejected giant sighed and went back mulling to in the corner.

"Great. Just great…"

There was a mechanical strain from the door. Brightness gushed into the cell.

Barret looked to the light and felt his heart leap at once: there, beyond reason or explanation, Tifa and Marelene appeared before him now like a heavenly vision, eyes forgiving and arms reaching out to take him back, into the light…

Then he noticed the armed guard standing behind them. The light vanished. Reality bit down. Hard.

"Papa!"

"Marlene…" Barret dropped to his knees, dizzy and bewildered as he took the child under his paw. "What are you doing here?"

Tifa stood in the threshold and watched them sadly. The guard pricked her forward with a jab from his rifle and set about shutting the door behind her.

"Wait!" Wobbly from the tranquilizers and poor health, Reeve stumbled like a beseeching zombie towards the jailer. "Wait! For pity's sake, the girl's only six–"

The guard nodded, slugged him in diaphragm, and locked the cell shut.

"Reeve!" Tifa rushed his side, lifting his back and supporting his head on her knee. She looked down and saw a growing red spot in the dirty linen around his shoulder. "They're just leaving you here, in your condition?"

"Don't worry about me…"

"You need medical attention! If this goes on untreated you could die!"

He puffed up a feeble, bitterly amused sound. "Hff. Their idea of due process?"

"Hey!" For the first time Marlene had looked away from her papa's tearful embrace and recognized the former Shinra employee. "I know you!"

"Marlene…"

"You're the bad kidnapping man! Let us go!"

"It's not his fault."

"No, Tifa, it's all right." With great pain and effort, Reeve extended a feeble hand across the floor. "I'm sorry… so sorry, my dear. I built this damned city and I can't even make it safe enough for you grow up in. So now you're the one who has to suffer, again, here with me in custody once more." His eyes brimmed with tears. "God forgive me…"

"Oh..." Marlene knelt down and touched Reeve's cold trembling fingers. "Don't be sad, mister. As long as you're sorry then everything's all better. I forgive you."

"No!"

All eyes fell to Barret.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" Tifa snapped in reproach.

"He's got no business asking for forgiveness. I mean, I…" The words trailed off. Barret looked at the floor darkly, sighed from the bottom of his heart, and began again in a shaky voice: "It's me… I'm the one who got us into this."

"You?" Reeve looked at him incredulously. "What makes you say that?"

"Okay, okay," Tifa pleaded, "let's not get sidetracked–"

Reeve ignored her and pressed on: "Barret?"

"Please, you guys–"

"I bombed the refinery. In Sector One. I was one of the Ghadma Liberation Front."

Silence clogged the air.

"You…" Reeve whispered numbly. "Even after the reactor, after everything, you–" He suddenly broke off, his spirit and body too wracked to go on.

Self-hatred absorbed Barret's soul as he observed the anguish which the already-wounded man now felt on his behalf. "I was an idiot," he offered helplessly. "I still am. I was angry and impatient so I made a deal with the devil. I tried to get out while I still could, but–" A fresh wave of remorse overcame him and dashed his head against his fists. "Damn it all! If only I coulda known then that they were working for Shinra!"

"Shinra and the GLF…" Reeve muttered the words distantly; his weathered mind struggled to keep pace with the sudden flood of implications.

"Shinra, the Front, the police, and who knows how much else of the city they control – they're all in it together. The Ghadma were just a distraction from real threat, a proxy to do Shinra's dirty work for them."

"With that kind of information I can see why they've got you locked up in here," Reeve noted wearily. "But to come after Tifa – after Marlene! It's insane!"

"They couldn't just get rid of me. They had to find my connections, tie up loose ends."

"That can't be all there is to it," Reeve tried to begin.

Barret roared over him: "It's all my fault! I dragged them into this! I risked my family for revenge!" He bashed himself on the concrete wall until howling rage sank to the floor in whimpering despair.

Meanwhile, Marlene sat in the dark scary dungeon and watched with a silent, suppressed look on her face as every pillar of strength in her life crumbled into a nervous wreck.

"Get a hold of yourself!" Tifa shouted desperately. "Yes, you screwed up, we all know that. There'll be of time for penance later, but right now we have to concentrate on getting out of here!"

"You," he droned, turning to face the other way. "You can do that without me."

"What… what are you saying?"

"Ibsen, Shinra, all those corporations… I wanted to see them burn so bad. I was so focused on hating them that I became what I hated most. And I didn't even realize it. I worked for them, Tifa, I committed crimes for _Shinra!_"

She thought he would slam his head into the wall again, but he only sighed. His rage had burned itself out; all that remained of the man now was a cinder of his former self.

"I've earned my position with the company," he concluded, "and it's right here in this cell."

"Come on," Tifa cried in helpless supplication, "you don't really mean that!"

"Maybe I do…"

His daughter clung to his knee fiercely. "Papa no!"

"I'm sorry Marlene, but these hands have too much blood on them to carry you anymore."

"So what?" suddenly escaped Tifa. "You think you're special?" She thrust out her palms with conviction. "You think these are any cleaner?!"

"Tifa…"

"Make a mistake once or twice, blow up a reactor or a refinery, no one is innocent here!"

Barret bent his head. He looked down into the metal of his hand, his fading eyes hinging there on a question.

Just then he felt little hand press itself into his one warm-blooded palm.

"Come on Papa, I wanna go home."

Tifa took his hand of steel and pulled it away from his face. "No matter whose fault it is, we're stuck in this together… whatever happens, we're still… a family." She swallowed hard and continued, a shadow of a bittersweet smile hidden somewhere in her wrought expression: "No getting off this train, right?"

Barret squeezed his eyes shut. Dozens of emotions wrestled for supremacy in his scrunched face. He took a deep breath and opened eyes, slowly…

"Reeve…" he began, in a faltering tone, "you… you can still control Cait Sith from here, can't you? From your brain chip or whatever…"

He shook his head plaintively.** "**Shinra's apparently learned its lesson since they last had me locked up. Something in the building's scrambling my signal."

"Damn!" Barret cursed with feeling, rising to his feet. "All right, c'mon now, we gotta put our heads together and think!"

"Maybe," Reeve thought aloud, "if I could…"

They all leaned toward him with their eyes, frozen in expectation.

"Ah... wait..." he put a hand to his mouth. "Darn. Never mind."

Everyone's head dropped with disappointment.

And then the wall exploded behind them.


	24. Flight and Pursuit

Reeve lifted his head flinchingly, the blast still ringing in his skull as he blindly groped through the dust and wreckage.

"Is anybody hurt?!"

"Not us!" called out Tifa, shielding Marlene's face and ears safely in her embrace.

"Same here!" grunted Barret. "What the hell happened?"

When the smoke and pulverized rubble fell, a ragged portal overlooking the hazy Midgar skyline appeared out of what had been the blank and terminally flat surface of the prison wall before.

"Huh." Barret peered over the chasm's edge and followed the drop with his eyes into the glittering city below. "I don't know what could've done something like this so high up!"

"I wonder…" Reeve muttered to himself, still collecting his thoughts amid the shock and debris.

High-altitude winds played across the newly formed aperture, resonating at a shrill and eerie pitch with prison cell's acoustics. Emergency sirens soon joined in the wailing chorus.

"This might be our only chance," Tifa declared. "We'll have to climb down."

Barret recoiled with physical aversion at the notion. "You nuts? We gotta be at least sixty stories up!"

"From the ground perhaps." Reeve stepped in with sudden authority, struggling to his feet. "But we don't need to break out of the entire government building, we only need to break out of PSS headquarters."

"What're you sayin'?"

"I conceived the basic features of this building when I was designing Midgar. It's basically a progression of narrow tiers on top of wider tiers... like a wedding cake, right?" He described the shape in the air with his hands. "So when these tiers come together, the roof of the lower one creates a sort of shelf at the base taller one. Right now we're somewhere around the top; all we have to do is get down to the roof of the middle tier, and then there's a walkabout leading inside."

"Security will be here any minute," he added more urgently. "Now or never."

Fearful nods of consent followed.

Tifa uncupped a tiny hand from Marlene's ear and whispered into it: "Okay sweetie, I'm gonna need you to hang on tight and keep your eyes closed until I say you can open them… can you do that for me?"

The child resigned with a feeble whimper.

Tifa turned to Reeve. "What about you?"

He paused.

"I… I'm too weak to make the climb," He concluded stiffly, eyes receding into a pall of grimy hair and shadow. "I'll stay behind and do what I can to cover your escape. Now hurry and–"

Barret casually obviated this plan by hoisting Reeve over his shoulder with the ease of lifting a doll.

"Come on short-stuff, no need to get heroic on us."

The decision was made. The way was before them.

Tifa hugged Marlene close to her body and went through the breach first, dropping quietly onto the outer ledge of the floor below. Barret kicked off his cumbersome boots and went down barefoot, curling his toes over the narrow foothold to compensate for their overreach. Reeve clung to the front of him so that he could keep his back flat to the wall, the imperative of self-preservation having excluded any consideration for how ridiculous it must have looked.

The wind beat down eyelids and drowned out eardrums. Tifa and Barret continued along hugging the skyscraper's exterior, never stopping to contemplate the twinkling city laid out beneath them, asphalt arms spread wide and ready to receive their corpses whenever.

After inching like this halfway around the sixty-third floor, they came upon an adjacent scaffold. Contractors had been repairing parts of the building still showing damage from Meteorfall (and providing the current government with a good excuse to further distance itself from its predecessor by remodeling the old Shinra HQ). Naturally, the workers' platform had to be founded on something, and so it stood on the circumferential difference formed between the upper and middle portions of the building, just as Reeve had explained.

The four fugitives made their way from the last row of planking and onto solid concrete where they set out for…

Barret turned to the other head on his shoulder. "Which way now?!"

"I recall there being doors on the east and west flanks..."

Barret was already running north, right behind Tifa and Marlene.

"Whoa! Go back! Go back!" Reeve impotently slapped his transport on the head, momentarily forgetting who he was and reaching for a megaphone that wasn't there. "Stop! We're headed for the–"

"I know where we're headed!" He snapped back. "Take a look behind you!"

PSS. Dozens upon dozens.

"Crap! Crap, crap, crap! Okay! Okay… do you see any operating towers up ahead? Yes, an operating tower will have stairs!"

"An operat– like this one?"

"Yes, yes! Open it!"

"C'mon…" Barret planted his foot on the door for leverage and pried at the lock. "C'mon, damn it!" He pounded and kicked until the handle broke off in his prosthetic vise grip. "Goddammit!"

"What about the other one?"

"Also locked!" Tifa called out from the other side of the platform.

The clipping sound of gunfire and chopping propellers sounded in the distance.

"Shit! We gotta keep moving!"

"It's a dead end ahead!"

"You want to turn back and explain that to them?" Tifa shouted impatiently between breaths.

"What about those tubes comin' out the end? They gotta lead somewhere, right?"

"Where've you been the last two years? She's had her tubes tied!"

"Well I don't hear you throwin' out any ideas!"

So they kept on running on a fixed track toward the inevitable, going further and further until they reached the tip of the Sister Ray's barrel.

Nowhere left to run. This was the last stand.

Tifa and Barret, the most able, stood at the front of the pack with hopeless determination, unarmed but still poised to strike as the oncoming army of police closed in.

"Can I open my eyes yet?" Marlene whimpered.

"Just a little longer," Reeve lied, positioning himself between her and the PSS.

The officers lined up in three ranks at ten paces away. A dozen rifles cocked and clicked in chorus.

"Not bad."

**_Choopachoopa…_**

Reno stepped out from the back of the formation, putting his hands together in a few sarcastic claps. "Not a bad way to die… going out in one final blaze of glory, and with a view up here like this – not bad at all!"

**Choopachoopachoopa...**

"Still, I'm afraid I can't let you folks go just yet." He tried to sneer; the giant wad of bloody bandage in the middle of his face made it come off ridiculous.

**Choopachoopachoopa-****choopachoopa...**

"So, if you'll all just come quietly and– dammit! Who the hell called in the chopper?"

Suddenly, the horizon on the other end of the cannon vanished completely, eclipsed by a solid barricade of rapidly rising hull and gyrocopter-rigging.

"Climb aboard!" Cid shouted from the top deck, motioning toward the rope ladders unfurling from the guardrail. "As for the rest of you pansies–"

He held up a sizzling stick of dynamite and pitched it to the cops. The formation promptly revolted from within and tore itself in two: one half running away, the other tripping over itself to reach the explosive and either snub it out or chuck it into the streets below, depending on how generous one felt. An unlucky few got pushed over the side of the cannon amidst all the commotion and panic.

In the meantime, Tifa and Barret made smart use of the diversion, scooping Marlene and Reeve and heading for the Highwind. Cid's men fired machine guns to cover their escape.

Reno cut his way through all the chaos, found the dynamite and snuffed its fuse between his fingers.

He held the stick in his hand. A funny look jumped to his face, sat there for a moment, and then darkened.

He crunched the hollow tube in his fist.

"Idiots! Do I have to everything myself?"

He vindictively called on the gravity materia in his electromag rod and launched a level-three demi spell at Barret and Reeve.

It hit the latter. The pull of gravitational distortion wrenched Reeve from his tenuous grip and cast him down.

Barret instinctively twisted around and caught him by the wrist.

"Hang on!"

But the demi spell grew ever stronger, bending gravity as beams of light are bent through a magnifying lens. The frame of this lens was a narrow one, however, enfolding only the object of the spell and some of the mechanical arm to which he now clung for dear life.

Barret's arm, caught in the rift between two extremes of normalcy and distortion, was slowly but surely tearing itself apart. Joints began to pop; steel began to groan and bow.

Reeve looked up at him with alternating flashes of terror and determination. "Barret, whatever happens–"

A cold snap pierced the moment. The prosthesis gave out, broke off at the attachment point. When the combined efforts of the airship crew managed to haul in Barret's resistant mass, he was thrashing like a lunatic, still reaching out with the metallic stump of his arm to offer the hand that wasn't there to the man who had gone with it.

"No!" he ranted endlessly, "not again! Not again!"

He'd seen it again, that look in his friend's terrified eye – that same look of shock shrinking away beneath him, clinging uselessly to his severed limb like a broken promise.

"Not again!"

Reeve fell and landed on the cannon, hard. Expectations say he should have been squashed like a bug right then and there, but Reno had apparently called off the demi spell just before impact. The natural laws of physics, however, were by no means kind: Reeve's already injured body hit the Sister Ray with a brutal thud, buckling and tumbling over the curve of the barrel. He barely managed to stop himself by the screeching of his palms, failing limbs clinging to a losing battle for dear life.

He'd be able to hold out for another thirty seconds, maybe.

"Grab on!" Cid shouted, throwing down a line.

A great white-hot spark singed it in half.

"Shoulda stuck by the company, Tuesti…"

Flanked by his men, Reno holstered his electromag rod and looked down the side of the cannon with a sneer. "Bet you wish you had that golden parachute now, eh?"

Reeve scowled and kept clawing uselessly at the receding arc beneath him.

Reno continued: "The way I see, it you have two choices…"

At his command, the officer on his immediate right unwound a length of grappling-wire threw it down the side of the barrel.

"Us or the sidewalk: what's it gonna be?"

Reeve didn't hear a word of it. His mind, his whole being was eaten up with pain and exertion, effort upon effort excised from his blasted body. His vision began to blur and recede around the edges; his grip on the cannon and the rest of the waking world was slipping away fast. This was the end, he thought.

No, he knew it.

With one last ounce of strength, Reeve Tuesti looked up at the stars and prayed to the Universe for a quick and easy return. That was the last thing he saw: dimming clouds and fuzzy starlight drifting off, the sky falling up and away from him.

But then there was one cloud, one little purplish puff that seemed to moving opposite of the rest, falling towards him…

"Aroooo!"

From the sky there came a protector heaven sent: strong, stalwart, loyal and lug-headed; fierce and automatic in its actions…

The golem had come back for its master.

Acting on pure algorithmic instinct, the AI-driven moogle lunged from the deck of the Highwind and hit the Sister Ray running, plowing through anyone and anything in its path like a demon-possessed sock puppet shot out of robot furry hell. Police bullets bore though cotton and silicon, severing hoses that bled orange hydraulic fluid into the moogle's lilac fur. It roared savagely, staggered and swung at its offenders like a baited bear. Every swipe of its paw was a velvet sledgehammer; the armed men stricken by it were but toy soldiers, cast aside as by a child in a tantrum.

Reeve drifted in and out of lucidity. His hold endured by seconds.

"I'm not losing to no doll!"

Reno flicked his rod to maximum voltage and charged at the automaton with intentions of sticking it in the circuits and shorting out its mainframe.

This scenario was ruled out rather quickly, as the moogle turned to face its attacker and quite by accident bopped him in the bloody wad of bandage currently serving him as a nose.

The Turk screamed like a wounded animal and fell to his knees, clutching his face in blind agony.

Reeve's hold broke. He passed out from the exertion and slid into fatal freefall. His inert body yielded and tumbled.

The way was clear; the golem wasted no more time. It activated the seldom-employed magnetic locks in its feet and dashed down the side of Sister Ray, catching Reeve just as he slid off the barrel's the terminal curve. Remaining PSS trailed their escape with more bullets, streaked the moogle's back with more orange blood, but it only ran faster. The cylinders in its legs fired like jackhammers; big floppy bunny feet shuffled into overdrive.

And then, calling upon every last joule in their capacity, the moogle's mighty haunches shoved off and vaulted the golem and master into the sky.

Momentary mid-air immortality. And then gravity reclaims its title.

Their ascent reached its peak and steadily dropped. The moogle's novelty wings flapped oblivious to their comic purpose; margins were narrow and not even a fool's hope could be wasted.

The machine's fingerless mitt crimped the airship by an inch, grabbing a bit of the piping around the hull. It tossed Reeve aboard, pulled itself up, and the Highwind was free to take to the skies.

.

.

Reeve felt the weight of his face smashed against a pillow. His head was heavy. He could hear people milling about him, talking about something. He rolled over and felt a dozen aches flare up.

He groaned and opened his eyes with a sour expression. "Let me guess… I'm still alive?"

"You're in the ship's infirmary," answered the medic. "You're safe now."

"How you doing there buddy?"

Reeve blinked and saw Cid's face come into focus. Tifa and Marlene's soon followed.

"All right… thanks to friends like you."

A tattered plushy paw clung to him with fierce devotion.

"Aroo!"

"Ow! Hey now, I meant you too!"

The moogle became pacified and released its grip.

Reeve sighed in exhaustion. "Where's Barrret?"

"He's fine," answered Tifa. "Just short some hardware. The mechanics are taking care of that now."

Reeve touched his forehead and groaned. "That was one hell of a rescue…"

"Well, maybe if you stayed put instead of running across cannons we could have picked you up on the second pass."

"How'd you even to find us?"

"Oh, that?" Cid smirked and undid the giant zipper on the moogle's back, revealing its inner matter."One of my technicians reconfigured this guy here to trace your location from that doohickey in your head."

"But the building… they were blocking my signal."

"Pah, nothing my tech-guys can't work around! Reverse-encrypted the jamming frequency or some mumbo jumbo, easy as that. Talk to them about it if you still give a shit by the time this is all over."

"Ahem–" Tifa cut in delicately. "let's not forget there are young ears present."

"Oh, right… ah, guess I better get used to it, huh?" The salty sky captain scratched his head and turned to Marlene, looking completely lost. "Hey, uh, listen sweetie, don't pay attention to anything your dopey old uncle Cid says. Here, why don't you play with, uh…" He began fishing through his pockets for something that might entertain a child. "Aha!"

He pulled out a box of matches.

"Cid!"

"It's all right, I won't be needing them anymore… _I'm quitting_!"

"No, I mean… that's not–" Tifa sighed in resignation. "Never mind."

Cid nodded. "Okay then… now would one of you mind telling me why I just flew across the world and broke a couple dozen international laws?"

"You were right to take such drastic measures," said Reeve. "There's no telling what they had planned for us in that tower."

"Yeah, well, normally I don't take on the entire Midgar government over a dropped phone call, but someone did try to kill you a few days ago."

"And I have every reason to believe that this someone also arranged our imprisonment. The fact that they included Marlene in the arrests makes this clear. Why detain a child if not as a hostage? They threatened my life for the sole purpose of luring Cloud into Nibelheim, it's only natural they'd employ similar means of coercion to trap him there."

"Then that's where we're gonna go put an end to this!" Cid snarled confidently.

Suddenly the doors to the infirmary burst open.

"Captain! Come Quick!"

"Something wrong, Mills?"

"We're being tailed!"

"What the f–"

Cid's eye caught a disapproving glance from Tifa.

** "**Err, I'm on it!"

.

.

The motions still automatic to him, a rattled Cid Highwind took a drag of air from a phantom cigarette.

"So…" he exhaled darkly. "What're we dealing with here?"

"PSS special division air enforcement unit, fighter class. Cold-burning engines, dewclaw tracer-missiles– you know, it's all state-of-the-art with these things."

Cid felt his old careworn heart sink. The Highwind wasn't equipped to stand up to anything like that. She was a civilian vessel now: repossessed from Shinra, purchased by Ibsen, and now leased to Rocket Town for commercial use in exchange for everything but his soul. The only firepower the ship had now was the RPG they'd shot off the observation deck to take down that prison wall.

"Speed?"

"Four hundred knots…"

"Distance?"

"Three hundred kilometers and closing!"

"Huh. How many feet in a kilometer?"

"Three-thousand two-hundred and eighty-one, sir!"

Cid did the math.

"Shit."

Running a fretful eye over the main control panel, he set his sights on that familiar pair of levers that "had always bugged him" back in the day.

"Here!" He began hopefully, taking the lever on the right. "We could jettison the propellers and switch to turbo thrust…"

Another crewmember shook his head. "Still not fast enough to outrun the them."

The lever on the left.

"Detach all auxiliaries and go into emergency escape mode?"

"I hate to say it, Captain, but no matter what we do, they'll still be right behind us."

"Right behind us…" Cid dropped his head and looked at the levers again.

"How many feet did you say there are in a kilometer?"

.

.

"How much longer?"

"Coming into firing range at an estimated twenty-five seconds," one of the operators droned from his control station.

Reno sat at the top of the command deck, unhinged eyes leering over a blood-smeared cold compress at the rushing skies ahead.

"You're not getting away from me," he babbled to himself.

"Fifteen seconds," the operator announced. "Ten… nine–"

Commotion arrested the countdown as cries of panic broke out over the deck.

"Mayday!"

"Emergency brakes!"

"Pull back!"

"No, no, NO!" Reno jumped out of his chair and screamed at the scattering crew below. "What you think you're doing?! We have them right in our…_"_

He looked up and saw what they were running from: a twenty-foot woman in a red bikini.

_Sight…_

He dove for cover as the decaled turbine exploded through the ship's windshield and carved the control deck in two. In the meantime, likewise samples from the Highwind's jetsam all left matching marks on the rest police craft.

Sirens croaked; everything throbbed emergency red. The words _system failed_ and _impact imminent_ became repeated motifs in the computer's disturbingly placid babblings.

Reno bit his lip.

"Darn..."

.

.

Tinny plucked notes and wispy embers of fireflies entwined and trailed into the balmy night.

"Wark!"

"Wark! Wark!"

William Gurin (better known as Choco Bill) set his banjo on the porch truss and fingered his pipe in the direction of the chocobo corral.

"Something done spooked them birds good…"

He turned to his son.

"Billy?"

"Beats me, Pa."

The sky rumbled above them.

"Though from the sound of it, I'd reckon they've got 'emselves worked up over a storm comin' in."

"That don't sound like any storm I ever heard," Bill replied shakily. "Billy… go find your sister and wait in the cellar."

"But Pa–"

"I said go!"

He ran inside, fumbled through the jam closet, and came back out with a lantern and shotgun. He looked up toward the noise and saw a smoking shape fall into view.

"I knew it! I knew it! Them UFO objects have finally came back!"

The unidentified aircraft bore down like a smoldering comet. It hit the ground at an angle from the nose, turning up the earth in a tsunami of dirt and grass. Layers of burning metal ripped and peeled from the wreck as it furrowed to a halt less than a few hundred meters shy of crushing the Chocobo rancher's humble homestead.

Bill ran out to the crash site, struggling to keep his trembling aim steady as the emergency hatch popped off the ship.

An inflatable slide deployed and coughed up a battered, bleeding man in a blue suit.

Bill lowered his gun and simply stared before he figured he should say something.

"You, uh… you need some help there, son?"

"I think…"

Reno took three limping steps forward and collapsed.

"…I think I might've broke my nose."


	25. Calm Before the Storm

Mount Nibel. The sky seemed to be leaning toward night, but then it was hard to tell here, where the air was muddy and a perennial haze of livid-gray ruled over everything.

Nibelheim was within the space of a thirty-minute hike, yet at this rate it would take all of an eternity to get there.

Red XIII was lying under the standing corpse of a deformed pine, paws folded in repose. Vincent had unsnapped his cape and begun to fieldstrip his rifle over it.

Cloud cast another forlorn glance at their PHS – no signal, same as the minute before. And the minute before that… and every other minute to pass within the last three hours.

He looked down at Cait Sith; he put the cat's grinning countenance upright and watched abjectly as it fell back into a lifeless slump.

"Still no word Reeve…"

"It would seem that way," Red noted unhappily. "And without him to record our findings, whatever truth we learn out here dies with us…

"Erm, figuratively speaking, that is."

"He could always control the toy from his mind," Vincent observed quietly. "To break contact like this, he'd have to be–"

"I know, I know... it's bad." Cloud leaned forward and sighed into his hands. "We'll give him another two hours. If he isn't back online by then, we plan our next move."

Red XIII did not disagree.

"Time to kill..." Vincent laid the Death Penalty over his knee and cocked back the charging handle. "Might as well make use of it then. Any final preparations?"

"Not really…"

"Hm." Vincent's seemed to shift from one inscrutable mood to another. "No mandatory search for our own special reason for fighting this time?"

Cloud wasn't sure if he liked where this conversation was going.

"My reason remains the same," he answered stiffly.

"Oh… well I found one."

"You did? What is it?"

"Mmm... I don't think so."

"Huh?"

"If you won't say what yours is, why should I?"

"I've told you before. My reason for fighting was– is a memory... and it's none of your concern."

"Then we'll leave it at that," Vincent ruled indifferently.

Cloud turned from the group and looked off into the bleak wasteland behind them. They'd come so far. Looking at the mountains' cruel peaks, he could almost measure on the horizon where Nibelheim fell.

Two hours.

He exhaled.

"You really want to know?

"I came to Midgar as a mercenary. Living from job to job, putting my life and others' on the line for a few lousy gil. I figured it was only a matter of time before I got killed, and I didn't really care."

He idly tapped a stone off the narrow mountain path with his foot.

"Sure enough, I hadn't been at it very long when I got blasted off a bridge, fifty something stories high. The fall should have killed me flat-out, no question. And still... for whatever reason, I woke up all the same."

He closed his eyes.

"More than anything, I remember how it felt to lie there, to be alive in that moment. The warmness. The stillness. The smell of plants. And the odds – of all the places I could have landed, of all the people in the city – that has to be more than chance, something like that's got to be destiny. It was like fate had pulled me from that reactor and given me better things to fight for, things I'd thought were gone forever, like flowers and… hope. And from there it only grew. The further we went, the more I believed this journey was ours... our time to make up for all the loss in the past and claim new happiness in the future…

"I was naive."

Cloud said nothing else. He stood there a while longer, contemplating the scene. At length he drew a cleansing breath and summoned himself back to his friends.

"So, Vincent… what's your reason?"

"Right..." He scratched his scalp and looked serious. "My reason for fighting is to one day find a reason."

Cloud's expression fell flat.

"Cheater…"

Red XIII, characteristically, was more interested in trying to understand: "Vincent, do you have an idea maybe of what your reason might be, when you do find it?"

"Hm..." He fingered his chin like a cellist tweaking a tuning-peg; his voice hummed with meditation from the pit of his collar. "I don't know. Something inspiring I guess. Whatever moves me, I don't care what it is."

"I'm pretty sure you have to care about something to be moved by it," said Red XIII.

"Caring... I tried that once."

"And were you moved?"

"Yeah. Worst moment of my life…"

.

.

.

A guy named Sal whistled an idle tune as he put in the last rivet joining the gatling gun to the wrist-template.

"All done, Mr. Wallace."

"Huh." Barret flexed his newly appended arm admiringly. "I don't s'pose you have any of my old shoes laying around in that armory of yours?"

"My navigator's about your size," Cid rasped warmly, entering the room. "I'm not above forcing him to work barefoot."

Tifa came in next, pushing Reeve in front of her on a wheelchair.

"You're lookin' better," Barret observed of the latter, now bundled up in a warm blanket and hooked up to an IV on casters.

"It's thanks to you I'm here at all," returned Reeve.

A soft and solemn shade touched Barret's features; he quickly looked the other way and shrugged his shoulders casually.

"Ah, well, you know how it is... Avalanche can't just leave one of its own behind, right?"

"One of..." Reeve lowered his head and smiled. "Yeah, right."

Pause.

"So, uh, any luck getting in touch with Cloud and the rest?"

"That's actually what we wanted to talk about," Tifa quietly chimed in, turning to Reeve.

"Mm, yes..." He bit his lip and nodded. "To put it in layman's terms, the scrambling signal back at that detention facility has got my mental controls all screwed up."

"You mean you can't reach 'em at all?"

"I'm working with some of Cid's crew to assemble a makeshift control station for Cait Sith using parts from my moogle and one of the ship's computers. But we don't know how long it will take, assuming we can get it to work at all…"

"Then that means we gotta hurry…"

"We're already on course for Nibelheim," said Cid.

Tifa nodded warily. " yeh, right... but we need to take Marlene somewhere safe first."

Barret expressed agreement.

"No problem, we'll be passing Rocket Town on the way. Only thing she'll have to worry about there is Shera coddling her to death."

"Thank you, Cid. I don't know what Cloud and the others are up against, but…" Tifa paused as if gripped by a terrifying premonition. "It could be dangerous just being near there right now…"

.

.

Darkness had fallen. Cloud, Vincent, and Red XIII were crouched in a ditch on the escarpment descending into the iron gates of Nibelheim.

"What the hell?"

"Something wrong?"

Cloud handed the binoculars to Vincent. "See for yourself."

The former Turk did a standard procedure scan of the area and soon spied a pair of armored men passing under a coal gas street lamp; the infrared visors glowing in their trioscopic helmets made them look like three-eyed demons.

"SOLDIER?"

"At one time, probably. A lot of cadets were out of a job after Shinra got de-fanged. Many of them turned mercenary to make ends meet. But why they'd be wearing the old uniforms is beyond me."

"Hm." Red XIII huddled low to the ground. "Perhaps they still entertain notions of the old empire."

"They or whoever is paying them," said Vincent.

"I can't say what these guys are doing here, but I'm guessing it has something to do with our arrival – and I can tell you right now there's gonna be a lot more than two of them."

"What do we now?" Red XIII asked somewhat apprehensively.

"We move in."

"Are you sure? We still don't know where Reeve is, and–"

"And it might be too late by the time we find out if we just sit here."

"Hmm. Indeed."

Just then, Cloud felt a cold metal claw perch on his shoulder.

Vincent looked to him with haunted eyes.

"That mansion… all the hellish memories it holds… are you ready to go back?"

Cloud became quiet. He lifted the buster sword over his head and locked it between his shoulder blades with a heavy click.

"Let's mosey."


End file.
